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GERMANY EMBATTLED 



GERMANY EMBATTLED 

AN AMERICAN INTERPRETATION 



BY 

OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1915 



,4 
1?> 



coptright, 1915, by 
Chaklks Scribner's Sons 



Published February, 1915 




FEB 25 1915 

©CI.A391881 
Oft , 



'K^ 



TO MY MOTHER 
IN DEEPEST GRATITUDE 



Acknowledgment is hereby made to the Review of 
Reviews, the North American Review, and Scribner's 
Magazine for kind permission to reprint, with 
alterations, four of the chapters in this volume. 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

I. Germany at Bay 1 

II. The Two Germanys 30 

III. German Militarism and Democracy . . 45 

IV. The Propaganda in America 74 

V. The Kaiser and the War 104 

VI. Imperialism and the German Parties . . 126 

VII. The United States and the Peace Treaty 157 



I 

GERMANY AT BAY 

A WONDERFUL quiet, certainty, and 
determination unto death are character- 
istic of all Germany to-day, and even 
with all the sorrow we are undergoing we deeply 
feel the greatness of these times. God bless 
our arms!" No other phrase that has crossed 
the ocean more completely states the German 
frame of mind when the mobilization was over 
and the empire could catch its breath and re- 
alize that by the most sudden, as well as the 
most violent, of convulsions the Germany and 
Europe of yesterday had gone forever — that 
the whole world had changed overnight. 

The writer, a woman of rank and position, 
had but just parted, dry-eyed, from her husband 
and sixteen soldier relatives of a family which 
boasts of having had no civilians among its 
members since 1700. She had no word of re- 
gret; only a prayer that she might keep her 



2 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

self-control and be found worthy of a crisis 
which had revealed the entire nation so united 
and determined as to wipe out in a moment all 
differences of rank, religion, and party. To de- 
scribe that hour of self-abnegation and self- 
sacrifice many a gifted writer and man of affairs 
has found himself utterly at a loss. The thrill 
and the uplift born of its whole-souled devotion 
wrenched the populace loose from the purely 
personal considerations of life and stirred them 
with all the enthusiasm which comes from a 
readiness to die for a common cause. The 
psychology of the crowd was at its noblest 
height. Even the foreign spectators caught in 
the sudden swirl of vast, loosened reservoirs of 
national feeling found it impossible to observe, 
save with awe, conviction, and deep emotion, 
this profoundly impressive transformation of a 
people. 

To the Germans their cause is just, their con- 
science clear. No such outburst of lofty en- 
thusiasm for Kaiser and country would have 
been possible had there been anywhere as seri- 
ous doubts as troubled, in England, Charles 
Trevelyan, Ramsay MacDonald, John Burns, 



GERMANY AT BAY 3 

and Lord Morley. As the facts were presented 
to the German people there seemed to be no 
question that their war-lord, who had kept the 
peace for the twenty -six years of his reign, had 
in this emergency stood for peace until the last 
moment, moving only when Russian perfidy 
compelled him to. It was necessary to strike j 
first, even as a football team seeks to "get the 
jump*' upon its opponents, for if Russia or 
France were to deliver a blow while German 
mobihzation was under way and incomplete, 
the country would be in the position of an old- 
time frigate raked by a broadside when "taken 
aback" and helpless. The public actually trem- 
bled lest the Kaiser hold off too long, and when 
he moved he seemed to them of Olympian 
stature. His language, bombastic as it may 
have appeared abroad, was pitched to the key- 
note of the hour; one heard for the first time 
praise of him as unser lieber, guter Kaiser. He 
stood for the whole people when he opened the 
war session of the Reichstag and, with his great 
sense of dramatic values, called upon its leaders 
to come forward and place their hands in his — 
even the Socialists, whom he had dubbed trai- 



4 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

tors to the country in a speech at the Krupp 
works but a few years before. All this at the 
very moment that battahons in every town and 
city were marching, singing, to the front and 
Von Emmich's divisions, without waiting for 
siege-guns or reservists, were victoriously as- 
saulting Liege. 

With this profound belief in the righteousness 
of its cause, the nation went to war joyously 
exalted, wondering at itself and its power. Its 
leaders had hoped, they said, that the nation 
was strong and sound and firmly welded to- 
gether in all classes by the bands of union forged 
under the stress of 1870-71. They knew it 
now to be true. They had not been sure that 
what is considered a decadent age had not af- 
fected the rugged virtues; that prosperity, 
material and scientific success, had not some- 
what palsied the ability to think in terms of the 
nation. The wonderful response of the people 
filled all doubters with joy. Not only was it 
unnecessary to drive a single conscript to the 
ranks, but two millions of men who for one 
reason or another had escaped military service, 
or had passed beyond it by reason of age, vol- 



GERMANY AT BAY 5 

unteered, begging to be sent to the front. It 
is no wonder that the national motto, '^GoU 
Mit Uns," was translated by Kaiser and people 
into that positive aflSrmation of the aid of the 
Deity which has so offended the world's on- 
lookers. 

Yet, when the nation gazed abroad in this 
moment of lofty exaltation and found that 
Italy, her ally, held back; that Belgium also 
flung herself into the struggle with absolute de- 
votion in order to protect her territory; that 
England joined the enemies to east and west; 
that Japan, who had learned her military art 
from Germany, obeyed the orders of England 
to come to her rescue in the East; that the 
sentiment of the United States and other neu- 
tral nations was wholly against her — it was 
then that a feeling of absolute incredulity gave 
way to absolute anger. It was the English 
upon whom the waves of their wrath broke pri- 
marily. They had cut the cables connecting 
Germany with the outside world; they it was 
who spread abroad the false stories that Liege 
held out until August 17 and that the Germans 
were guilty of acts of brutality. It was Eng-| 



6 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

land who told but half the story in her White 
Paper. It was England whose abstention from 
the war Sir Edward Grey had been ready to 
put up for German bidding until, driven into 
a corner, he refused to name his final price. 

The English thus appeared before the Ger- 
man nation as traitorous to its civilization and 
culture, because its statesmen had so often de- 
scribed their people as "cousins across the 
Channel"; because there had existed the warm- 
est cordiality and co-operation between the sci- 
entific and learned men of both countries; be- 
cause they were of kindred racial stock and in 
their ideals nearer to one another than to France 
or Spain or to the Slavic power to the east. As 
the Germans analyzed the situation, their joint 
type of civilization was threatened with com- 
plete submergence by the brutal Russian forces 
which England had opposed at every turn since 
the Crimean War, against whose aspirations in 
the Near East the England of Gladstone had 
set itself like the Rock of Gibraltar; the Russia 
whose institutions are the exact opposite of 
those of liberal England; the hands of whose 
Romanoffs have reeked with the blood not only 



GERMANY AT BAY 7 

of its Jews but of all Russians who sought liberty. 
Whatever may have been the theories of the 
Bernhardis and the extreme militarists, the Ger- 
man people as a whole felt such a kinship to the 
British, with whom their royal family is so closely 
allied, that it was almost like a stab in the back 
from a brother when England declared war. 

Did the English, all Germany asked, not 
comprehend that it was their battle which she 
was fighting.? To Germany, Austria was well 
within her rights in sending the ultimatum; its 
language was no harsher than the circumstances 
warranted. In moving to avenge the archduke, 
Austria did no more, as Ambassador von Bern- 
storff puts it, than the United States would have 
if emissaries of Huerta had murdered the Vice- 
President of the United States. Russia should 
have allowed Austria to punish Servia, not only 
for the murder at Sarajevo, but for years of open 
anti-Austrian agitation bent on despoiling her 
of her provinces; that Russia moved proved to 
many a German that Russia herself was behind 
the Servian agitation; that Servia was merely 
the Czar's cat's-paw. When Russia acted Ger- 
many was compelled to follow for two reasons: 



8 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

her honor as an ally was as much involved as 
England's was engaged to France by the secret 
understanding, and she could not permit mobili- 
zation on her boundary, since her chief hope 
was to dispose of France before the Russian 
masses could be drawn up at her frontier. The 
possibility of war on two frontiers has never 
been lost sight of in Berlin; there has not been 
a day since 1880 that the German General Staff 
has not studied and restudied its plan for de- 
fending the nation against a simultaneous 
French and Russian attack; there has not been 
a day during this period that the German army 
has not been confident of its ability to de- 
feat both enemies. But to defeat them and 
England, too ? It cannot be denied that for 
the moment even military Germany was stag- 
gered. 

But only for a moment. Then, with a quick 
"The more enemies the more honor," the nation 
pressed on, easily persuading itself that the real 
underlying issue was not only Russia's position 
— testified to in the White Paper by Sir Edward 
Grey-c— that Austrian domination of Servia 
would be intolerable to her, but Russia's deter- 



GERMANY AT BAY 9 

mination to undermine first Austria and then 
Germany for her own aggrandizement. For a 
few days the air was full of this cry of Slavic 
peril, that Germany stood alone against the 
Huns — as Western culture had once fought to 
keep the Turks out of Europe — until the ques- 
tion of Belgian neutrahty thrust this into the 
background. That some Germans realize that 
her moral position would be far stronger to-day 
had she left Belgium untouched is deducible 
not merely from the chancellor's confession that 
she had violated a law of nations; it is admitted 
frankly by a few, like Professor Paul Natorp, 
of the University of Marburg. Yet even he 
has convinced himself, like all Germany, that 
the French would have marched in with the 
consent of England and of Belgium herself if 
the Germans had not; they are the more certain 
of this now that the Germans have found the 
telltale papers in Brussels showing that the 
British were plotting with the Belgians what 
they should do if Belgium were invaded. That 
French troops and officers were actually cross- 
ing the boundaries when the Germans were, 
and that some were already in Liege, Namur, 



10 GERMANY ElMBATTLED 

and Antwerp, is believed from one corner of 
Germany to another. 

But, even if this were to be disproved, the 
Germans as a whole are behind the chancellor 
in his belief that to invade Belgium was justi- 
fied by that direst necessity that knows no law. 
It was the only way to protect their own unforti- 
fied Belgian frontier. Why could not the Bel- 
gians have realized this and spared themselves 
all that they have suffered, by letting the Ger- 
mans march quietly through .f* The Kaiser's 
troops would have disturbed or injured no man; 
they would have made good any injury done and 
paid handsomely as they went. For the rest 
of the world to cry out against what happened 
as a result of Belgian folly, in the manner that 
it has, passeth understanding from their point 
of view. For England to protest seems to Ger- 
many the height of hypocrisy. England stand- 
ing for the rights of small nations — the same 
England that wiped out the Boer republics; 
that consented shamefully to Russia's crushing 
out of Persia; that connived at France's swallow- 
ing of Morocco when the ink on the treaty of 
Algeciras guaranteeing Moroccan integrity was 



GERMANY AT BAY 11 

scarcely dry ! Merely to state the case against 
"perfidious Albion" was to prove its shameless- 
ness. 

Hence the Germans have convinced them- 
selves that England's seizing on Belgian neu- 
trality as a reason for war was but the hollowest 
of shams. Everything that is now disclosed 
but proves in Berlin a long-planned conspiracy 
to ruin Germany because of her success in the 
world. It is envy that is at the bottom of it all, 
a wicked, criminal envy because German ships 
are filling the seas and German commerce is 
growing by leaps and bounds and her merchants 
are capturing the marts of the world hitherto 
the private property of John Bull. It is all so 
clear and plain that Germany could not under- 
stand why the rest of the world could not see 
it, too. "But wait," she cried, "until the Ger- 
man side gets out to the rest of the world, then 
its moral opinion will turn to our aid." Mean- 
while, the question of Belgian neutrality went 
into the background like the Slavic peril; the 
stake was now the preserving of German Kultur 
(not culture, but civilization) from all the world, 
if need be. 



12 GERMANY EMBATTLED 



II 

German Kultur ! What this means is the 
riddle of the hour to many who honestly seek 
to fathom the Teuton point of view. Is there 
a German "culture" or civilization superior to 
any other? And is that Kultur typified by 
autocratic Prussian militarism which slashes 
lame cobblers and bends the nation to its own 
imperious will? Is it typified by the Kaiser in 
his war-lord moods, as when he bade the Ger- 
man troops departing for China carve their way 
to Pekin with ferocity? "I have," he said, "to 
re-establish peace with the sword and take ven- 
geance in a manner never before seen by the 
world. . . . The German flag has been insulted 
and the German Empire treated with contempt. 
This demands exemplary punishment and ven- 
geance. ... If you close with the enemy, re- 
member this: Spare nobody. Make no prison- 
ers. Use your weapons so that for a thousand 
years hence no Chinaman will dare look askance 
at any German. Open the way for civilization 
once more." 



GERMANY AT BAY 13 

Or when he speaks of divine right, preaches 
the doctrine that might makes right, and de- 
nounces three milHons of his countrymen as 
traitors because they wish to reconstitute the 
nation? Does it mean the Germany of the 
university professors Hke Treitschke, who de- 
mand not only that Germany shall have "her 
place in the sun" but that she shall aggressively 
fight for it; the professors who dream of over- 
sea dominion, of making Germany the Rome of 
the twentieth century, who are so certain of the 
superiority of what they consider German civi- 
lization as to be ready to impose it upon all the 
world? 

Or does this word Kultur stand for that other 
Germany that all the world has come to love 
and praise, the Germany of kindliness and 
friendliness, of learned men to whom tens of 
thousands of Americans owe a never-ending 
gratitude; the Germany of poetry and music, 
with her rare love of nature; the Germany of 
humanitarian ideals that has led all the world 
in her efforts to solve social problems, ele- 
vated civic administration to the rank of a sci- 
ence and builded the city beautiful, while caring 



14 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

for her poor and her aged under laws all advanced 
nations are copying? 

To Germany herself what her Kultur stands 
for is the spirit behind both of these divergent 
Germany s, but not that which produces auto- 
cratic or militarist excesses; for it signifies the 
supreme expression of her life as a nation — 
the youngest of nations. In her brief existence 
she has made more positive contributions to 
knowledge and world-advancement than any 
other nation in the same period. At all times 
Kultur stands for wonderful discipline not only 
in the army but in party, church, and state, to- 
gether with equally marvellous efficiency. To 
this must be added an idealism amazing in a 
practical people which worships the expert and 
has wedded industry to science. On the one 
hand there is a deep, warm sentimentalism and 
on the other a union of minute knowledge and 
of comprehensive grasp of fundamental prin- 
ciples. Finally, there must not be denied as 
another component part a growing belief in the 
necessity and glory of armaments; a demand 
that the nation be allowed to play a role as a 
world-power even as Spain and England in their 



GERMANY AT BAY 15 

times. Something of a composite like this it is 
which Germany is defending to-day as her con- 
tribution to civihzation, as even more worthy of 
preservation than the precise framework of gov- 
ernment under which her citizens live; for it 
men and women are giving freely of all that is 
most precious to them. 

But as they give they suddenly find them- 
selves portrayed as barbarians, as savages with- 
out reverence for the very things that play so 
deep a part in their lives, and they are aghast. 
How is it that they can be so misunderstood? 
Is all the world poisoned against them.^^ Can 
such frightful lies triumph? They read them 
on every hand — the crassest falsities, chiefly 
from English sources, since London is not only 
the greatest financial exchange but the world's 
clearing-house for news. They, a united people, 
learn from the English press that the Kaiser 
had deliberately ordered every Socialist member 
of the Reichstag shot; that Socialist mobs were 
shot down in the streets of Berlin; that the 
people who rose in patriotic exaltation never 
equalled in modern times were driven unwill- 
ingly to the front ! Their Kaiser, beloved by 



16 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

great multitudes, is portrayed as a wholesale 
murderer who plunged all Europe into bloody- 
war when he could have prevented it; they 
themselves are pictured as slaves of a military 
cabal which plans the subjugation of France 
and England, the destruction of liberalism and 
the governing of Europe by an intolerable iron 
rule. They are told abroad that their soldiers 
are vandals who violate women, mutilate little 
children, murder in cold blood, and not merely 
destroy private property but priceless works of 
art never to be replaced — the common herit- 
age of mankind. In brief, they are accused of 
the very things of which they accuse, under 
oath, the invading Russians who in one East 
Prussian district alone are charged with three 
hundred and fifty murders of non-combatant 
men and women and children. 

The world, they suddenly find, believes any- 
thing of them — of them who have gone forth 
to war in the spirit of the crusader, not hirelings, 
like the British regulars, but a most democratic 
army of the people, united with a new spirit of 
brotherliness to their comrades in the ranks from 
all walks in life, from princes to 'prentices. 



GERMANY AT BAY 17 

There are fathers and brothers, yes, grandfa- 
thers, in every regiment, men of years, position, 
title, learning, and high standing in every com- 
pany, drawn together, not for plunder, not by 
lust of war, but to save their country, and all 
bound together by a discipline never approached 
by any other army. And of these it is said that 
they are like the Sioux Indians! Nothing to 
Germans could be worse than these slanders 
save what they themselves tell of the Belgians, 
of furies in skirts putting out with corkscrews 
the eyes of helpless German wounded and pour- 
ing boiling water upon them; of ununiformed 
citizens shooting out of cellars and from attic 
windows, and rising treacherously, as at Lou- 
vain, when led by priests and professors. Noth- 
ing surprises them more than that any one 
should look upon the burning of Louvain as any- 
thing but a just punishment for acts directly 
contrary to the laws of war. When their own 
villages have been shot to pieces and burned 
by Russians without its creating an outcry in 
America, they cannot see why the burning of 
Belgian villages, the natural result of shelling 
troops out of them, should seem anything else 



18 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

than an ordinary incident of war, the hell that 
is war that they, under their Prussian generals, 
propose to make so terrible a hell by legitimate 
severity that their enemies will soon submit. 

The fact that the Belgians lied to all the world 
about Liege, and similar misrepresentations, the 
Germans are ready to bear with as part of the 
game. But not the calumnies of their troops, 
as if they were Bulgarians or Serbs or Greek 
marauders. That is the last straw, and the head- 
lines, ''Wir Barhareriy' "Wir Unmenschen," now 
appearing in the German press over records 
of British and French prisoners' appreciation of 
their kindly treatment, testify to the hurt in- 
flicted. And so we have the German professors 
spurning their British decorations and academic 
honors, and the terrible prospect that between 
these two Teuton nations, which ought to be 
the best of friends, there will exist at the end of 
the war, whatever the outcome, a bitterness 
and a hatred beside which the latent hostility 
of French and Germans since 1870 will seem 
mere childish irritation. The Germans simply 
cannot understand when they hear that Eng- 
lishmen of German names are changing them 



GERMANY AT BAY 19 

because, as in one recorded case, they say that, 
the Germans have been carrying on war "con-j 
trary to every dictate of humanity." 

Conscious of their rectitude, clear as to the 
injury done them, certain of the triumph of 
their arms, their faces are now turned to the 
neutrals, but particularly to the great North 
American republic where dwell so many of 
German birth. With German love of thorough- 
ness and system they have formed committees 
for the purpose of presenting the truth abroad. 
They have showered every attention upon re- 
turning Americans in the passionate belief that 
they will be ambassadors of good will and re- 
porters of the right. Citizens everywhere are 
besought for names of friends or relatives in 
America to whom literature may be sent, in 
full faith that the United States, so ill treated 
by Great Britain in 1776, 1812, and during the 
Civil War, will particularly express its horror at 
the policy which has sent against their Kultur 
hordes of black, brown, and yellow troops from 
Africa, India, and Asia. 



m GERMANY EMBATTLED 

III 

It may, therefore, be about the hardest blow 
of all when Germany realizes that her represen- 
tations of the facts as she sees them, and her 
contentions, have from the first been freely 
printed in the American press, together with the 
views of Dernburg, Mtinsterberg, Francke, Von 
Jagemann, Kuhnemann, Burgess, Sloane, Bid- 
der, Hexamer, and Ambassador Bernstorff, but 
that the American public as a whole continues 
unconvinced. The United States remains firm 
in its belief that the responsibility for this ter- 
rible misfortune which has overtaken humanity 
rests primarily with Austria and next with the 
Kaiser. "The final help," says the London 
Times, "is the mighty duty of America." What 
Germany, in its eagerness for that "final help," 
does not yet appreciate is that the unfavorable 
American judgment was based on consideration 
of the facts, and particularly of those relating 
to the invasion of Belgium. Our good opinion 
was forfeited by Germany when the Kaiser re- 
jected Sir Edward Grey's offers to assure peace, 
when the "scrap-of -paper" incident occurred. 



GERMANY AT BAY 21 

and when the imperial chancellor exalted the 
law of necessity above the law of nations. 

Berlin must learn that this judgment cannot 
be altered either by fuller appreciation of that 
thrilling uprising of the Kaiser's subjects or of 
their unanimous belief in the justice of their 
cause or of their readiness to die for it. There 
are plenty of American men and women who 
recall the wonderful rallying about Lincoln in 
1861. "Who that saw it," wrote James Russell 
Lowell, "will ever forget that enthusiasm of 
loyalty for the flag, and for what the flag sym- 
bolized, which twenty-six years ago swept all 
the country's forces of thought and sentiment, 
of memory and hope, into the grasp of its over- 
mastering torrent .f*" In France to-day we are 
witnessing a less-exploited but similarly moving 
uprising of the people, actuated by the profound 
belief that it is the very existence of France 
which is being fought for as well as the "giving 
to the whole world liberty to breathe, to think, 
to progress." But waves of national sentiment, 
however they may bring tears to the eyes and 
quicken the heart's beat, prove nothing in them- 
selves. 



22 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

The same is true of the question of the atroci- 
ties. If the United States did or did not be- 
lieve all of them, or believed none of them — 
even if it approved and did not profoundly 
disapprove the dropping of bombs without 
warning into defenseless cities, the exacting of 
ransoms, the holding of unarmed citizens as 
hostages, t.he burning of cities in revenge for in- 
dividual treachery — its final opinion would not 
be affected by the presence or absence of these 
horrible phases of war. War, it knows, lets 
loose every evil passion, inflicts every pain and 
torture known to man. But all of this, as 
thoughtful Germany must soon come to see, 
can have nothing whatever to do with the fun- 
damental moral issues involved, the right and 
wrong of the struggle, any more than does the 
question of England's consistency or her atti- 
tude in the past toward the Boer republics, 
Persia, and Morocco, or our own "water-cure" 
torturing in the Philippines. Regret that the 
German name is at present under a cloud the 
United States will; but no amount of evidence 
that these accusations are slanderous will achieve 
the real purpose of the German propaganda in 



GERMANY AT BAY 23 

America — the turning of the United States 
against the Allies. 

In the South African war American sympa- 
thies were chiefly with the Boers; in the Man- 
churian campaign overwhelmingly against Rus- 
sia. If sentiment to-day favors the Allies, it 
is plainly not because of any thick-and-thin 
friendship for England or for the Czar's despotic 
government. As a matter of fact, had France 
and England violated Belgian neutrality and 
entered Germany by her unfortified frontier, 
American public sentiment would have felt just 
as outraged by the wrong done by Frenchmen 
and Englishmen. The truth is that the Ger- 
man General Staff knew that the easiest road 
into France lay through Belgium, and they took 
it. But one may pay too high a price even for 
the easiest road, and the price paid by Germany 
was war with Belgium, England, and Japan, 
and the final forfeiture of public opinion every- 
where. The laying waste of Belgium, be it a 
legitimate incident of war or not, has stirred 
the world to its utmost depths. Americans 
cannot but believe, as they pour out sympathy 
and aid to this stricken people, that it was 



24 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

wickedly unnecessary, and have, therefore, but 
restricted patience for German appeals. 

The sober second thought in Germany, of 
which one finds traces in Professor Natorp's 
articles, can but reflect ere long upon the infi- 
nitely stronger position Germany would be in, 
even were the steps leading to the conflict the 
same, had it fought a defensive war. Many 
defeats will probably be necessary to shatter 
German faith in the divine wisdom of its Gen- 
eral Staff, whose oJBScers had decided for years 
past that the best policy was that quick over- 
whelming of France which so nearly succeeded. 
The time must come, however, when Germans 
will wish with all their hearts that by keeping 
out of Belgium they had saved themselves three 
or four opponents and thereby held in some 
degree the sympathy of the United States. 
The position of the German and Allied armies 
at this writing shows a truth we had begun to 
suspect by the close of our Civil War, that well- 
trained troops behind breastworks are a better 
means of defense than the best forts. No one 
can be foimd to believe that if Germany's sol- 
dier millions had merely lined their own fron- 



GERMANY AT BAY 25 

tiers and waged a defensive campaign behind 
forts, or trenches where there were no forts, 
France and Russia, fighting alone, could have 
made headway against her. The horrible losses 
of the raid into France would have been avoided 
and the control of the sea would indubitably be 
hers. There would have been no charges of van- 
dalism or soldier misconduct to combat and to 
deplore. Plainly a Bismarck was needed, not 
only on the diplomatic side, but on the military 
side as well. Upon the General Staff the blame 
for this utterly mistaken policy will eventually 
rest. 

By this it is not meant to imply that even in 
this supposititious case Americans would have 
been altogether on the side of Germany. For 
all our recent imperialistic excursions into Cen- 
tral and South America and the Philippines, 
despite our dangerously large navy, the spirit of 
our people is still as opposed to great military es- 
tablishments as in the first days of the Republic. 
As ex-President Eliot has put it: "The reliance 
on military force as the foundation of true na- 
tional greatness seems to thinking Americans 
erroneous, and in the long run degrading to 



m GERMANY EMBATTLED 

a Christian nation." It is probably true, as 
German speakers contend, that Bernhardi's 
book no more represents the real heart and 
mind of Germany than the vaporings of Con- 
gressman Hobson and the belligerent tracts of 
the pseudo-*' Lieutenant-General" Homer Lea 
really reflect the sentiment of the common peo- 
ple of America. To accept the teachings of 
books like these is to admit that mankind is 
well along on its return to the stone age. But 
every military system produces men who wor- 
ship war as war, believe it to be the normal 
state of man, and assert that there is no safety 
for any people but to make a soldier of every 
citizen. The German army has them in 
plenty, and, however democratic it may be in 
its ranks, it is controlled by a clique of profes- 
sional soldiers who, standing quite apart from 
the aspirations of the plain people, have, as 
now appears, made great strides toward domi- 
nating the nobler Germany and giving to its 
foreign policy an aggressive jingo note. Victory 
now would enormously strengthen the hands of 
the Treitschkes and Bernhardis, with whom the 
Crown Prince seems in such complete sympathy. 



GERMANY AT BAY 27 

No one can confute this merely by asserting 
that this is not a war of the Kaiser but of the 
whole German people, or by pointing out that 
in the haste to serve the Fatherland the two 
Germanys are now as one. In war-time there 
is always the demand that all differences of 
opinion be sunk and consciences stifled. 

No true friend of Germany in the United 
States can wish for her any success that will 
convince the masses of her people that true na- 
tional greatness depends solely on military 
power. To do so means positive infidehty to 
our own institutions — and to humanity. If 
there are those who preach this doctrine that 
true national worth is measured by the relative 
perfection of a military machine and the num- 
ber of battleships, they sojourn among us but 
are not of us. They are ignorant as to a chief 
teaching of the Republic; they are grossly un- 
true to the Germans of '48 who fled to us when 
the Prussian mihtarists blew to pieces that noble 
uprising and ended that brave if hopeless de- 
mand for true democracy. Whether the Ger- 
mans, bUnded by the Sturm und Drang they are 
now passing through, can perceive it or not. 



28 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

German victory would spell the strengthening 
of absolutism everywhere and of its bond-servant 
militarism. It would mean the subordination 
of the nobler Germany to the reactionary. It 
would mean not a Germany to be beloved and 
honored of all thinking men, but a Germany to 
be feared and dreaded, with all liberal tenden- 
cies crushed within her. Her chief aspiration 
would then, perhaps, be fresh territories to con- 
quer and certainly more and more sacrifices for 
the military machine. Against this possibility 
Americans must protest the louder the more 
they are indebted to Germany, the more they 
admire her, the more they pity her, the greater 
the anguish they feel that the very existence of 
this nation of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, 
and all the rest of its really great men has been 
recklessly staked in a war utterly unnecessary, 
about whose real causes no man is clear. The 
more he loves Germany the more the real Ameri- 
can must pray that she be saved from the dan- 
gerous forces within her which are threatening 
to overwhelm what is best in her. She must be 
shown that what is going on to-day is a denial 
of Christianity and nothing else. Her splen- 



GERMANY AT BAY £9 

did abilities, her powers of organization, her 
sentiment, her ideaHsm, the world needs for the 
prevention of wars and not for the deification 
of the war spirit. 

Americans who believe in self-government 
and democracy can take but one stand against 
absolutism and arbitrary power. They trust 
that as a result of this war thrones will every- 
where come crashing to the ground. In Ger- 
many we must hope for a reawakening of the 
spirit of 1848 which will recognize at least 
wherein lies the great power of the United States 
in this hour. It rests not in the number of our 
battleships nor in the size of our army, but in 
our moral power; in the vigor of our demo- 
cratic institutions, in the fact that this country 
loves justice, truth, and right; that the judg- 
ments of its common people are, in the long run, 
profoundly wise; that that judgment to-day is 
swayed neither by entangling alliances, nor by 
the lust of conquest, nor by the blasphemous 
doctrine that God is on the side of the largest 
battalions. If America is to-day, in this world 
crisis, the court of last instance, it is judging 
honestly on the facts and the facts alone. 



II 

THE TWO GERMANYS 

WHAT attitude conscientious German- 
Americans should take toward the 
war of nations was from the first a 
cause of no end of heart-break. For one thing, 
there was no Carl Schurz to lead the way in 
this emergency by one of those clear-cut ethical 
analyses with which he did so much to sim- 
plify and to clarify diflScult political problems 
for our countrymen of German birth or par- 
entage, as well as for native Americans, plenty 
of whom, for one reason or another, find them- 
selves in debt to German learning or German 
kindliness. Should they imitate the bulk of the 
German-American multitudes who are shout- 
ing, "Germany, right or wrong!" and waive 
all effort to place the blame by some such con- 
science salve as the phrase, "The Kaiser has 
sources of information not open to the public, 
and knew he had to strike or be overwhelmed" ? 

30 



THE TWO GERMANYS 31 

There are plenty of other reasons given in 
defense of the Kaiser, as we have seen. He is a 
new St. George slaying the Slavic dragon. He 
himself — so it is solemnly alleged — is respon- 
sible for those extraordinary conquests on the 
seas and in the marts of the world which have 
aroused British jealousy, and he must be trusted 
to know how to protect what he has created, 
and how to insure still greater conquests of 
trade. Is he not the true protector of Ger- 
many's faith in herself, of her intellectual as- 
pirations, and of the superb idealism of his peo- 
ple? Is it not patent that every man's hand 
has been raised against Germany because, as 
the Kaiser puts it, God has been with her — she 
has prospered exceedingly and the wicked now 
rejoice that evil days have come upon her? 
And should not German-Americans rally to her 
support even though they are loyal to the United 
States, even though her diplomacy has been at 
fault — even if the mistake in attacking Bel- 
gium was a terrible one? Right or wrong, 
should not one stand up for the Fatherland at 
this distance, just as the masses are called upon 
to in every country when it plunges into war? 



32 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

What intensifies the diflSculty of the thought- 
ful German-American is that there are those 
two Germanys to whose blending are due her 
Kultur and the animating spirit of the nation. 
However much some may deny, in view of the 
attitude of the German professors and the sub- 
mission to the war-craze of the Social-Demo- 
crats, that there are two Germanys, they exist 
none the less, even though temporarily welded 
together by the war, and they will be in evi- 
dence whatever the outcome. In a recent Ger- 
man gathering in New York there was but one 
voice of indignation at the aspersions upon 
Germany and her motives; suddenly in a lull 
a voice was heard to say: "But when it's all 
over we must drive out our Junker'' That 
one word stands for the reactionary forces in 
the empire, for those who believe in the divine 
right of rulers, in the mailed fist, in government 
by aristocracy, in might as against right, and 
have taught the doctrine that peace can only 
be assured if all the nations be armed to the 
teeth. Its adherents are those who see in the 
Waffenrock a garment before which the public 
must bow. They uphold the officers who run 



THE TWO GERMANYS 33 

civilians through at some fancied insult, and 
applaud those wearers of the uniform who re- 
sort to the duel, long since outlawed by the en- 
lightened sentiment of the world. The Junker 
and their allies among the privileged are the 
Germans who intrench in power the ennobled 
and enriched classes; who are without trust in 
the people and are utterly opposed to the ex- 
tension of democracy, relying for aid upon a 
subservient bureaucracy. It is they who de- 
mand protective tariffs, who place such diffi- 
culties in the way of free importation of food as 
to make it practically impossible for thousands 
upon thousands of Germans to taste any meat 
save horseflesh. They are the all-powerful sup- 
porters of the Prussian Government in its re- 
fusal to remove the inequalities among voters 
within its electorate — against which one hun- 
dred thousand Prussians protested two years 
ago on a single day — for they are in power by 
reason of those inequalities. 

Incidentally they are of the type that gives 
so much offense to the rest of the world. They 
are arrogant and supercilious, and frankly with- 
out faith in anything save the power of the 



34 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

sword. It is they who have dictated the for- 
eign pohcy which has made friends of prac- 
tically nobody. It is they who, under Bis- 
marck's leadership, originally entered in 1882 
the game of taking the lands of backward races, 
in which all their neighbors and we ourselves 
have indulged. It is they who give the utterly 
false impression that all Germany has been 
bent on conquering where it could. It is they 
who make a large part of the world forget that 
the Germans are among the most lovable, use- 
ful, and enhghtened of peoples; that they are 
bound to us Americans by ties that ought to 
be indissoluble. Have they not enriched our 
blood .f^ Did they not come to us by the hun- 
dred thousand, fleeing from home because of a 
noble ideahsm which they transferred to our 
country, pledging their faith with their blood 
upon our battle-fields of civil strife — but always 
on the side of the Union and human liberty.'^ 
Surely no German-American who really believes 
in republican institutions and popular govern- 
ment can uphold this imperialistic Germany. 

There is a Germany other than that of the 
Junker, totally different, infinitely nobler. It is 



THE TWO GERMANYS 35 

the Germany of great souls, with its thinkers, its 
teachers, its scientists, its civic administrators, 
its poets, its glorious musicians, its philosophers, 
and its ideahsts. From them hosts of our teach- 
ers, our professional men without number, and 
others in every rank of life have drawn their 
most cherished inspirations. To her we owe in 
considerable measure our university develop- 
ment; from her came in large degree the impetus 
toward good civic government which has been 
one of the glories of our American progress in 
the last two decades. From this Germany 
Lloyd George has plagiarized those plans for 
the improvement of the welfare of the masses 
which have made him at once the best-beloved 
and best-hated man in Great Britain. 

In the civic care of her own this Germany has 
led the world, with all to do her reverence. She 
has known best how to build the city beauti- 
ful, and made good and progressive government 
the birthright of all her urban dwellers. In no 
other nation hasJ science in the same degree be- 
come the partner of commerce and of industry. 
Nowhere else has there been a keener intellectual 
freedom among those whose lives are dedicated 



36 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

to the pursuit of truth, or to the instruction of 
the young. Nowhere has there been a greater 
reverence for the aristocracy of intellect, or as 
generous a recognition of its achievements. 
To sit at the feet of its inspired teachers, men 
and women have come from all quarters of the 
globe, knowing that in a hundred fields this 
Germany leads the world. 

And it is this Germany which to-day lies 
prostrate before us. It is this Germany which 
is being slaughtered, whatever the reason or 
the excuse for the war. On behalf of this Ger- 
many any really enlightened ruler must have 
stood for peace against the world, no matter 
who might be mobilizing, or where — at least 
until attacked, and her soil clearly invaded. 
To the support of this kingdom of the soul the 
whole intellectual world would have risen — it 
did in "England — had the Kaiser but cried out 
its need and asked for allies to defend, and not 
to break, the peace. For it any one who real- 
ized its moral grandeur and worth ought to have 
been willing to abdicate rather than to plunge 
it into the abyss, the hell of war. 

But there it lies to be ravaged by its defenders 



THE TWO GERMANYS 37 

and its enemies at will. For it there can be no 
victory, whoever wins. Let there be no mis- 
take about that, whatever one hears about the 
glorious courage of her soldiers, and their pos- 
sible conquests. It is not only the laws which 
are silent between arms; all intellectual and spir- 
itual activities cease when men's sole thoughts 
are to kill, to destroy, to immolate, to make a 
mockery of Christianity. A whole generation 
is being wiped out; the flower of the land be- 
tween the ages of nineteen and twenty -four is to 
be sacrificed by a despotic ruler's decision; per- 
haps another Goethe, a Schumann, a Helm- 
holtz, are to be cut off in their youth; all the 
talents these boys possess are certain to go for 
naught. Those who survive are to be brutal- 
ized by the most frightful spectacle of human 
carnage the world has ever seen — by a sudden 
reversion to barbarism. If the troops of the 
Kaiser prove to be the better drilled and led 
so as to kill the greater number of their fellow 
human beings, intellectual Germany will not 
profit but will suffer thereby. 

It is not merely that her spiritual growth has 
been checked, and that the pursuit of knowledge 



38 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

IS at an end. A terrible blow has been struck 
at Germany as the seat of wisdom. Interna- 
tional bonds of infinite worth have been sun- 
dered not to be reunited for decades to come; 
the Germany of calm, scientific reasoning has 
been submerged by the mad rush into a war in 
which the Kaiser has staked the empire itself, 
as well as every achievement of the nation- 
builders of 1870, and of those who have erected 
the great commercial edifice which has been 
the wonder of the world. If there have been 
envy and jealousy among the other nations, 
will not these feelings give way to helpless rage, 
to permanent enmity, if the greatest of military 
machines should triumph? Will not there be 
another Napoleon only a shade less dangerous 
than the overlord of a century ago, to inspire 
distrust and to court another Waterloo .^^ And 
if Germany is conquered and lies prostrate in 
sackcloth and ashes, what endless humiliation 
will be hers ! What dreams of revenge upon 
all the world may not then fill the minds of 
those who, in such a spirit of exaltation, set out 
to humble their sister nations to East and West ? 
Is it not certain that, whatever the outcome. 



THE TWO GERMANYS 39 

Germany will for decades be among the most 
hated of nations? Worst of all, every reac- 
tionary element in the German Empire, every 
privileged class, every believer in the divine right 
of the few who have obtained power, will profit. 
Here is precisely where a chief wickedness of 
the war lies. More than four millions of Ger- 
man citizens are afiihated with the Social- 
Democratic party. These "traitors" now have 
been forced into the ranks, but the evils against 
which they protested bulk as large to them, 
their devotion to their cause is the same. 
They have fought autocracy at every turn, 
only to be bound and dehvered now by the old 
snares, the old teachings that one's country 
must be upheld in war-time; that it is proper | ; 
to commit murder if one but murders by whole- 
sale — teachings that are to-day doing their 
antichristian work in England, France, Rus- 
sia, and Austria as well. It is the Junker, the 
grasping landlords, the insolent tariff barons, a 
bigoted Catholic clergy as in Bavaria, and the 
military and the aristocratic castes who do 
more to recruit the Socialist party than all their 
own leaders combined. Whether one be oneself 



40 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

a Socialist or not, for their democratic striv- 
ings America must have complete sympathy. 
What have they to gain by this war save the 
privilege of additional military service if Ger- 
many wins, and greater and greater tax bur- 
dens ? 

For them the war spells so obviously the 
checking of their cause as to make many won- 
der if this foreseeable fact was not one of the 
motives of those who welcomed it and brought 
it on. Let no one be deceived by the super- 
ficial assertion that as Germany rose to imperial 
riches and greatness after the war of 1870-71 
so she will rise still further as a result of this 
one. The earlier struggle was but child's play 
compared with this, while there were economic 
forces at work which, together with the final 
abolition of customs and trade barriers between 
the states of the empire, accounted for that 
great growth after 1871, but cannot come to 
the rescue now. A foreign war — how often 
has it not come to the aid of endangered forces 
of privilege even when not deliberately sought? 
How often has it not weakened and checked 
the onslaughts of liberalism.'* 



THE TWO GERMANYS 41 

Will it long avail to tell the dissenting Ger- 
mans that the Slavic peril must be combated; 
that in this world-war Destiny speaks and that 
it had to come sooner or later? Doctor Lieb- 
knecht's daring revolt in the Reichstag seems 
to indicate that it will not. Are they not inevi- 
tably to count the cost when the slaughter is 
over? Will they not more than ever cling to 
the party of "treason" which dictates that such 
things shall not be? Will they not turn to 
any one who teaches that it shall be taken out 
of the hands of one man or a group of men to 
say whether a nation shall return to barbarism 
and slay the best that is in it? If they do not, 
then will the obsession of this frightful struggle 
have taken a deeper hold than can be believed 
to-day. Surely the German masses must be 
utterly blinded if they do not ask themselves 
more than ever whether it is because of a gov- 
ernment by the few that such national catas- 
trophes are possible; whether it is not in spite 
of such autocratic government, however benev- 
olent and however efficient along certain civic 
and military lines it may be, that the liberal, 
the cultured Germany of to-day is what it is. 



42 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

What might it not be if its intellectual freedom 
were to be typical of the freedom of the masses ? 
How much greater might not be the spiritual 
kingdom which it has built for itself under these 
conditions? How much happier would be the 
masses of the people ! 

The masses of the Kaiser's empire ! To them 
surely the sympathy of the world must go out 
as to the poor Belgians who have died before 
the invaders without knowing why, realizing 
only that a hell of shot and shell had burst 
without warning upon them as lightning from 
the sky. On the heads of the German masses 
lies not the blood-guilt. They come from smil- 
ing homes, from the castled hills of Thuringia, 
the vine-clad banks of the Rhine, the plains of 
Prussia, the poppied fields of Bavaria. They 
and their kind have been rising steadily against 
fearful odds, helped on by favorable social 
legislation, held back by the heavy taxes im- 
posed by the military Moloch, and by their 
three years of army service; hampered in the 
cities by grinding poverty and checked every- 
where by iron castes. Their villages have just 
begun to grow, to give signs of a development 



THE TWO GERMANYS 43 

corresponding to that of the cities; to the peas- 
ants have come at least the harbingers of social 
justice; something of the prosperity of the na- 
tion was beginning to be theirs. But now the 
mother of every able-bodied son must know her 
boy is upon the firing-line to destroy the sons 
of some other mother — because the "Triple" 
Alliance demanded it. For these solid peasants, 
the backbone of the country, war can bring 
nothing save woe and debt. 
*^For a German- American whose heart goes 
back to the country that gave him or his fathers 
birth, there should be no difficulty in deciding 
where his sympathies should lie. Sorrow as he 
must for the German masses, if he places reason 
above emotion and sympathy, he can but with- 
hold his support from the Kaiser who made no 
better than a dicer's oath the solemn promise 
of the empire to respect the neutrality of Bel- 
gium. If he has owed anything to the great 
minds of Germany, her men of peace, of knowl- 
edge, science, and art, let him now pay the 
debt of being true to their ideals, however far 
some groups of them may be drifting from their 
anchorages, deluded by false visions of glory 



44 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

and of what constitutes genuine national no- 
bility. He might well remember that Goethe 
himseK faced a German army, when it had 
been beaten by ragged French republicans, to 
assure it that then and there a new epoch had 
begun. Another new epoch has begun for 
Germany; the fates have grievous days in 
store for her. However difficult it may be, the 
German-American must think out for himself 
what is going to be best for Germany in the 
long run, and ask whether victory by force of 
arms would not injure the ideal he holds for the 
Fatherland far more than would a chastening 
defeat. If he does this conscientiously from 
the American and the republican view-point, 
there should be but one answer. 



Ill 

GERMAN MILITARISM AND 
DEMOCRACY 

NINETY-THREE German savants who 
pledged their honor and reputation to 
the truth of their statements have re- 
cently declared that German militarism is one 
and indivisible with German culture. "With- 
out it," they said, "our culture would long since 
have been wiped off the earth." From many 
other German sources come denials that Ger- 
many's mihtarism is a menace to the peace of 
Europe or to anybody else. It is defended, 
moreover, not only as a cultural but as a demo- 
cratic institution. Germans are to-day thank- 
ing God for their militarism, on the ground that 
but for it Napoleon would never have been 
humbled and the German Empire would never 
have come to pass; that to its extent and thor- 
oughness alone Germany owes her safety at 

45 



46 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

this hour, when she is beset by the troops of 
nearly half the world, but has thus far carried 
on the war almost entirely on other people's 
soil. It is therefore worth while for Ameri- 
cans to examine this German institution care- 
fully, particularly as we are already being told 
by certain soothsayers that the war convicts 
England of folly in not having resorted to uni- 
versal conscription, and places upon us the duty 
of still greater military burdens, since by some 
occult reasoning it is apparent to them that if 
Germany wins we are to be the next victims 
of her aggrandizing ambition. 

Like the nation itself, the German army is 
curiously two-sided, for it is both a democracy 
and an autocracy, but with the autocracy on 
top. It is a democracy because within its regi- 
ments are men of every rank and caste, of every 
grade of learning and every degree of poverty 
and wealth. It is democratic because it is com- 
pulsory and because it spares none. No amount 
of " pull " or power can free a German from his 
year or more of service; if he escapes, it is be- 
cause the army's draft for the year when he 
becomes liable for service is so large that all 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 47 

cannot be cared for in the existing organizations, 
or because some physical disability insures his 
exemption. Thus, when the call to arms came 
on the 4th of August it was literally an uprising 
of the people. The great wave of emotion which 
exalted the whole nation gained its impetus be- 
cause men of every class went forth, singing, to 
die. Barriers of all kinds were levelled; in the 
enthusiasm of that tremendous hour, caste and 
rank were, for the moment, forgotten. The en- 
tire citizenship was drawn together by the lev- 
elling influence of devotion to a single cause. 
For the moment all Germany was a democracy, 
and democratic were the forces which stormed 
Liege, and swept like irresistible gray-green 
waves of the sea through Brussels, until they 
were nearly in sight of the defenses of Paris. 

In the trenches to-day lie side by side, as 
common soldiers or non-commissioned officers, 
men who have made their mark in the field of 
learning, or science, or business, or the skilled 
professions. Some reserve regiments would seem 
to be a cross-section of the population. One 
of its lieutenants may be of humble origin, a 
minor official, let us say, in the Dresdner Bank; 



48 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

serving with him may be a reserve lieutenant 
who drafted last year one of the most important 
bills ever laid before the Reichstag. A reserve 
non-commissioned officer who reports to them 
may be a survivor of the twenty-six Socialist 
deputies to the Reichstag who found the call of 
conventional patriotism far more compelling 
than the peace principles of their party. A 
lieutenant next to them may bear the plebeian 
name of Wilhelm Muller, yet be one of the 
ablest junior officials of the Colonial Office, for 
the moment bedfellow with a police officer of 
Berlin who has exchanged the pursuit of crim- 
inals for the pursuit of the French. Next in 
line may be a university professor of distinction, 
a painter for whom great things are prophesied, 
a musician of note, and with them may be serv- 
ing apprentices, laborers, street-cleaners, con- 
ductors, hod-carriers — men from every humble 
and honorable walk in life. It is reported that 
the Kaiser recently met a soldier of the Landwehr 
driving a lot of hogs, whose presence on the road 
stopped the royal motor. To the Kaiser's de- 
light, when he asked the spectacled herdsman 
whether he was a farmer in time of peace, he 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 49 

answered: "No, your Majesty, I am a professor 
in the University of Tubingen." 

There is similarly no discrimination among 
regiments when war is on; as far as this the 
General Staff's democracy extends. Whatever 
the prestige of a regiment in peace times, 
whether it be the Garde du Corps, the crack 
cavalry regiment, or the Death's Head Hussars, 
until lately commanded by the Crown Prince, 
or one of the Imperial Infantry Guards, it meets 
with no other consideration than that of the 
most plebeian infantry regiment when the fight- 
ing is under way. It makes no difference if 
every officer in it is of ancient and noble hneage. 
The Guards are reported to have been among the 
heaviest losers in the present war, precisely as 
at St. Privat in 1870, when five battalions lost 
every officer, and were fighting under their ser- 
geants when the day was won. It is just the 
same with the Kaiser's younger sons; they have 
gone into the actual welter of battle exactly 
as if offspring of the humblest Westphalian 
peasant, Prince Joachim being wounded by 
shrapnel and Prince Oscar collapsing from ex- 
haustion and heart weakness after a charge at 



50 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the head of his regiment against Turcos, whose 
bullets laid low most of his regimental officers. 
The Crown Prince may be safe by reason of 
his being the nominal commander of an army, 
but his brothers are alive to-day only by the 
fortunes of war. Not unnaturally the German 
press has drawn biting contrasts between the 
sons of the Kaiser and the Prince of Wales, who, 
it was officially announced in England, was at 
twenty not sufficiently trained as a soldier to 
go to the front until three and a half months 
of war had passed. That the privilege of dying 
as the German General Staff wills belongs to 
princes as much as to anybody else is attested 
by the death of Lieutenant-General Frederick 
Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, a brother-in-law of 
the Kaiser's sister, and of other notables. 

But the brief for the democracy of the Ger- 
man army does not end here. It enforces, so 
its adherents claim, a fine standard of personal 
conduct, of physical vigor, and of loyalty to 
King and country throughout the nation. The 
army takes the humblest conscript, however 
ignorant and lacking in self-respect, and turns 
him out a decent, healthy citizen with a fine 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 51 

physique, excellent carriage, inured to heavy 
burdens, long marches, and absolute obedience. 
If he is a dull clodhopper from a Polish province, 
unable to speak German, the recruit is taught 
his King's language and how to write it; he 
learns, as Kipling puts it, to "wash behind his 
ears," how to eat, how to walk, how to keep 
himself scrupulously neat, and how to think for 
himself. 

The great lesson of subordination to au- 
thority is thus learned, and in many cases self- 
restraint, as a result of methods which are 
applied just as rigorously to the son of a million- 
aire or of an aristocrat. The natural German 
love of outdoors and of exercise in the open is 
intensified by service with the colors; a genuine 
comradeship with men in all walks of life springs 
up, and with it comes the ability to feel as a 
German, to think in terms of the nation, whose 
patriotic songs one and all sing as they march, 
for singing is a wise requirement of the German 
military training. Certainly, as the English 
military reports have so generously attested, 
this training teaches men to face certain death 
for the Fatherland with a devotion never sur- 



52 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

passed by Occidentals and equalling the stoical 
and fatalistic pursuance of death by Orientals. 
Again, the wonderful thoroughness of the mili- 
tary machine leaves its impress upon all who 
are for a time of its cogs, and to it is attributed 
some of that unequalled efficiency of the Ger- 
mans to which the nation owes its extraordinary 
national rise and prosperity. The army is, in 
other words, regarded as a vital part of the 
great German system of education. 

If this were all, to be said of German mili- 
tarism, its case would be, perhaps, won. Eng- 
land and the United States might then be 
tempted to add a similar course to their 
educational system. But there is the other 
side. 

It is hard to conceive of a closer corporation 
or a more autocratic body than the German 
General Staff; it is the army to which it gives 
the dominating note. It is a group of aggres- 
sive, hard-working, exceptionally able officers, 
envied by soldiers all over the world because 
the nation does as they tell it. In 1913, when 
they demanded one hundred and forty thousand 
more men, the war minister acted as their spokes- 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 53 

man, and the Reichstag hardly questioned; the 
bulk of the Socialists, foreshadowing their deser- 
tion of their peace principles, acquiesced by a 
cowardly approval or dodged by a refusal to 
vote. For the first time, after this vote the tax- 
gatherer knocked at German doors not to take 
a share of the income, but some of the citizens' 
capital, and no one protested. To question 
the General Staff would be like questioning the 
Deity, a fact which explains why, the General 
Staff having declared that it was essential to 
invade Belgium, nobody in all Germany doubts 
that decision. One may start controversies 
over sacred theology in the Kaiser's domains, 
but not one as to the all-embracing wisdom of 
the General Staff, for on that there have never 
been two opinions since 1866 up to the time of 
this writing. When the deadly forty-two-centi- 
metre guns were planned, the Grosser General- 
stab asked the Reichstag for a large appropria- 
tion and obtained it without disclosing in any 
degree the purpose for which it was asked. It 
was enough that the war minister declared 
the Generalstdb must have it for a purpose too 
secret and too important to be intrusted to 



54 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the Reichstag committee on army estimates or 
to any but the inner ring of the army. 

It is that inner ring which settles the fate of 
an officer after he has reached colonel's rank. 
Let one be overslaughed and he resigns at once. 
Let him blunder in the manoeuvres and his 
*' papers" go forward promptly; the General 
Staff sees to that. Physical efficiency is in- 
sisted upon as well as mental. An officer may 
be as dissipated as he pleases but^he must be 
on hand with a clear head for the five-o'clock 
spring and summer march-out of his regiment. 
His habits and customs may be deserving of 
all sorts of censure, but if he studies diligently, 
passes his examinations well, has good efficiency 
reports, and is altogether ein schneidiger Offizier 
his superiors will say nothing. There is no age 
limit as in our army, as is evidenced by the 
prevalence of men approaching seventy in high 
positions to-day. Thus, Generals von Kluck, 
von Hansen, and von Billow are sixty-eight; 
Generals von Moltke and von Emmich, the 
latter the capturer of Liege, are sixty-six; and 
Field-Marshal von Hindenburg is sixty-seven. 
But to hold their positions men like these must 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 55 

be vigorous physically and mentally, agreeable 
to the General Staff, and absolute upholders of 
the existing military traditions and order. 

By this we do not mean that each general 
must be a follower of Bernhardi. Many of the 
German generals probably never saw his book 
nor even heard of it. But they must subscribe 
fervently to the overbearing pretensions of the 
military clique, to the autocratic attitude of the 
army toward the civilian and the nation. They 
must carry themselves as members of an exalted 
caste whose adoration of their uniform borders 
on pagan worship. Take the case of Colo- 
nel von Renter, who commanded the Ninety- 
ninth Infantry, stationed at Zabern, in Alsace, 
and was acquitted in January of last year (1914) 
of the charges of illegal assumption of the ex- 
ecutive power, illegal imprisonment of civilians, 
and the invasion of private houses in order to 
make arrests. This was at the time when his 
young oflScers, whom one could hardly accuse of 
being democratic in spirit, were sabring or per- 
secuting the civilians, who were driven almost 
to revolt by the overbearing arrogance of the 
military. Colonel von Renter himself openly 



56 CtEr:\l\xy embattled 

and aggressively stated on his trial that if 
matters had gone any farther he would have 
turned his machine-guns, which stood ready in 
the courtyard of the barracks, on the populace. 
''Blood may flow," he had threatened at the 
crucial moment, ''for we are protecting the 
prestige and the honor of the whole army and 
the ^avelv shaken authoritv of the govern- 
ment."' ''I was convinced that om- govern- 
ment was allowing its reins to drag on the 
ground,"" he told the court, and so, iu the name 
of autocracy, he assured the pubhc prosecutor 
that "jurisprudence ends here," and declared 
martial law. 

A court of high officers sustained Colonel von 
Renter and his subordinates on the ground that 
a decree issued by the King of Prussia in 1820 
— not a law — gave the mihtarj' the right to 
inter^-ene, without waiting for a request from 
civil authoritv, if thev deemed the time had 
come to act. More than that, the army ex- 
pressly upheld the arrogant acts of the officers, 
for whom the judge-advocate never asked more 
than a week's or three days' imprisonment as 
punishment I Colonel von Reuter is reported 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 



O i 



to have won the Iron Cross; and the young 
officer who sabred the lame cobbler of Zabern 
is also at the front, but not, let us trust, in the 
name of democracy. In defending Colonel von 
Renter, the minister of war. General von Fal- 
kenhayn, who has been acting as chief of staff 
during the recent temporan^ illness of General 
von Moltke, declared that, while the colonel 
might have exceeded his authority at times, 
his acts, nevertheless, saved his officers from the 
necessity of running their swords through the 
insulting ci\'iHans m order to protect the honor 
of the "Kaiser's Coat." This coat — hardly a 
democratic garment — thus ine^^tably recalls 
Gessler's hat; the General Staff means that 
there shall be no \^tal difference between the 
deference asked of Wilhehn Tell and that which 
the German ci^^ihan owes to the "gay coat" of 
the mihtaiy. Officers have frequently been ap- 
plauded and acquitted, or at most imprisoned 
in a fortress for a few weeks, for stabbing ci\'il- 
ians or kiUing them in duels that are against 
the law but are often forced upon officers by 
decrees of the regimental courts of honor, whose 
ideals of conduct are direct inheritances from 



58 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the days of Frederick the Great. If the full 
story of these courts of honor could be written, 
it would astound people everywhere. 

In brief, the army is a narrow caste with pro- 
fessional ideals of a bygone time, scrupulously 
maintained in the face of modern progress by 
the ruling clique. From its highest officers, 
its General Staff, its Crown Prince, as well as 
its Kaiser, the army takes its tone as a bulwark 
of the privileged classes, to whom anything that 
smacks of democracy is anathema. It is the 
chief pillar of the great landlords, the Junker, 
and the aristocrats, as it is ' of the throne. 
When the Reichstag passed a vote of censure 
on the government because of the Zabem affair, 
an almost unheard-of thing, the government 
simply ignored the vote. Doubtless the im- 
perial chancellor and General von Falkenhayn, 
the censured ministers, smile to-day if they 
think of this incident, and reflect how com- 
pletely the war has placed the Reichstag, the 
Social-Democrats, and all the rest of the civil- 
ians in their power. There being no responsible 
ministry to fall in Germany, the fate of the na-* 
tion has rested — less than a year after their 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 59 

censure by the national parliament — in their 
and the Kaiser's hands. As for the Kaiser and 
the Crown Prince, who pubHcly upheld Colonel 
von Reuter, they may for the moment be demo- 
crats, but the only reason why they do not fear 
the Social-Democrats, whom a few years ago 
the Kaiser denounced as traitors to the country, 
is the existence of the army. General von Fal- 
kenhayn declared in the Reichstag, in Decem- 
ber, 1913, that "without the army not a stone 
of the Reichstag building would remain in 
place." Is there any doubt that this demo- 
cratic organization of eight hundred thousand 
men would close the doors of the Reichstag if 
the Kaiser so ordered.^ Did not the grand- 
fathers of those now in the trenches in the Im- 
perial Guard regiments crush out the repub- 
lican uprising in 1848 ? 

In this anti-democratic tendency the German 
army is not different from any other. The 
same trend toward caste and autocracy is no- 
ticeable, to greater or less degree, in every army; 
even a study of the social hfe of our American 
navy would prove this. If England creates a 
great standing army the same phenomena will 



60 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

be still more manifest than in her present 
regular force, which has been about the most 
undemocratic machine thinkable. The social, 
court, and petticoat influences that controlled 
the British service down to the Boer War have 
been known of all informed men. It took this 
present war, with its overwhelming need for of- 
ficers, to break down the barriers of caste erected 
against the common soldier. Lord Kitchener 
did an unheard-of thing recently when he ad- 
vanced one hundred and twenty -five sergeants 
and corporals to lieutenancies in a single issue 
of the official Gazette, yet no one would describe 
Lord Kitchener as an apostle of democracy. The 
nature of an army and its very organization are 
undemocratic ; the whole basis is a hierarchy with 
the power centring in one head. 

Of course, the autocratic nature of an army 
is not affected by the bourgeois antecedents of 
some of its officers. In Germany a man of 
plainest hneage, be he a good soldier, can rise 
to high rank. Of the active officers prior to 
the outbreak of war, 5.3 per cent were the sons 
of minor officials or of non-commissioned officers; 
that is, they came of families with no particular 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 61 

social position. A number of the German 
corps commanders are to-day commoners who 
do not write von before their names. But they 
must have inherited or married means in order 
to hold their present positions, since German 
officers cannot live on their pay. To no regi- 
ment can an officer be appointed until he has 
been voted on by his future comrades, just as 
if he were entering a select club. This may 
make for harmony and for efficiency, but he 
would be rash who would assert that it smacked 
of democracy. Of the rest of the corps of officers, 
as it existed at the beginning of 1914, 9.7 per 
cent were sons of large landed proprietors, while 
Q%.5 were sons of army officers, of civihan offi- 
cials, of judges, and of members of the learned 
professions. Only 15.1 per cent were sons of 
business men; the remainder, comprising Q.S per 
cent, represented a varied group of occupations. 
Of course, many regiments are wholly closed 
to men without title. The bourgeois officers go 
to the least desirable regiments, and Jews are, 
of course, quite good enough to be reserve 
officers, and serve as Kannonenf utter, whenever 
the General Staff pleases. But none hitherto 



62 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

have been regimental oflBcers, and none have 
risen to high rank in the staff departments to 
which they have been admitted as officers. Yet 
these are not the only undemocratic discrimina- 
tions. Such newspapers as the Jewish Frank- 
furter Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, as well 
as the Sociahst Vorwdrts — the Frankfurter and 
the Tageblatt are now unreservedly upholding 
the war and the army — have in the past filled 
columns upon columns with discreet criticisms 
of the mihtary. WTien the army increase was 
voted last year certain Sociahsts took the oppor- 
tunity to criticise the favoritism in regulations 
shown to the Imperial Guards. Of course, they 
accompHshed nothing. Why should the Gen- 
eral Staff pay attention to mere members of the 
Reichstag, and Sociahsts at that.^^ In a demo- 
cratic organization criticism of the organization 
is permitted; none is tolerated in the German 
army. When an exceptionally able mihtary 
critic of the Berliner Tageblatt^ Colonel Gadke, 
a retired officer, undertook to criticise the serv- 
ice, the mihtary authorities tried to deprive 
him of his right to sign as "former colonel" of 
an artillery regiment. That he is not figuring 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 63 

as a correspondent or critic now jhas perhaps 
some connection with this incident. Any effort 
to effect reforms in the army is certain to en- 
counter grave obstacles. Did not the late Gen- 
eral Bronsart von Schellendorf , one of the ablest 
war ministers Germany has had, fail utterly in 
1893-96, despite his high oflSce, in his effort to 
reform the army's court procedure and system 
of punishments ? 

If there is any atmosphere in which democ- 
racy does not flourish it is that of a Continental 
barracks. German discipHne is unyielding as 
iron. The power of the officer is absolute and 
that of the non-commissioned officer Httle less 
so. The men in the ranks change completely 
every three years, but the non-commissioned 
officers are usually professional soldiers for a 
long term, who know the ropes well. The condi- 
tions are such that brutal ones among them can 
make existence a hell for any man they do not 
Hke. Just as it is hard to prevent some hazing 
at West Point, so there is always some in the 
German barracks. It is often almost impossi- 
ble to checkmate brutality among the non- 
commissioned officers, because the presumption 



64 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

is always in favor of authority; so there are 
occasionally suicides in the barracks, frequently 
desertions, and sometimes trials of men finally 
caught in ill-treating subordinates. When Rosa 
Luxemburg, the fiery Sociahst orator, declared 
at Freiburg last year (1914), in speaking of the 
case of a horribly abused soldier at Metz, "It 
is certainly one of those dramas which are 
enacted day in and day out in German bar- 
racks, although the groans of the actors seldom 
reach our ears," General von Falkenhayn, as 
war minister, prosecuted the "Red Rosa" for 
libelling the army. The case was promptly 
dropped when her counsel announced that they 
proposed to call one thousand and thirty eye- 
witnesses to such wrong-doing, mostly in the 
form of "slaps in the face, punches and kicks, 
beating with sheathed sabres and bayonets, 
with riding- whips and harness straps; forcible 
jamming of ill-set helmets on the wearer's head; 
compulsory baths in icy water, followed by 
scrubbing down with scrub-brushes until the 
blood ran; compulsory squatting in muscle- 
straining attitudes until the victim collapsed or 
wept for pain; unreasonable fatigue drill, and 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 65 

so on. There were also abundant cases of ab- 
surd and humiliating punishments inflicted by 
non-commissioned officers, such as turning the 
men out of bed and making them cHmb to the 
top of cupboards or sweep out the dormitory 
with tooth-brushes." Now, single men in bar- 
racks are never plaster saints, as Kipling, the 
exalter of British militarism and hater of Ger- 
man militarism, has made quite clear to us. 
Sporadic cases of abuse happen in our own 
American barracks; but no one will, it is to be 
hoped, assert that in this phase of its existence 
the German army even faintly suggests a de- 
mocracy. 

This army has had its Dreyfus case, too, 
though the victim was not an officer, but a 
Sergeant Martin who on a second trial was 
found guilty, on circumstantial evidence, of 
killing his captain. The two civilian members 
of the court found him not guilty; the prose- 
cutor asked only for imprisonment, but the 
military judges pronounced the death sentence 
in addition to imprisonment. They felt they 
must uphold their caste, right or wrong. A 
lieutenant stationed at Memel was found to 



66 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

have beaten a soldier so severely with a sword 
that his victim had to be dropped from the 
military service, compensated, and pensioned 
for injuries "incident to the service." Not that 
the other type of oflficer is lacking. As the 
writ-er knows by personal experience, there are 
plenty of kindly, gifted, and charming oflScers 
who are neither fire-eaters nor war-worshippers, 
who write no jingo books and do not subscribe 
to Bernhardi. They despise the intrigues, the 
narrowness, and frequent immorality of the 
small garrison, and the dissipation of life in the 
big cities. They recognize the antiquated char- 
acter of the code of honor, but they are helpless 
to change it, and as they grow older the more 
ready they are to think an intense militarism 
the normal condition of society. If there are 
many officers of this type, particularly in the 
South German armies, the trend is, however, 
toward the overbearing arrogance of the Von 
Reuters, which is again merely saying that mili- 
tarism unchecked and unsubordinated to civilian 
control will run to excesses everywhere* ^.The 
note of Bernhardi has been more and more often 
heard with the cry that war is the natural state 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 67 

of man and that the German army is for war. 
It is quite possible that the Kaiser, in the last 
moments before the war, was overborne against 
his better judgment by the General Staff clique 
with which he is surrounded, and signed the 
fatal order practically under compulsion. But 
there were thousands of his offi-cers who went 
to the war exulting that the time had come at 
last when their years of devoted study and 
ceaseless training, unsurpassed in its compre- 
hensiveness and its intensity, were to give way 
to the practical application of all they had 
learned as to man-killing. 

The spirit of arrogance and aristocracy so 
characteristic of the extreme Prussian militarists 
has penetrated even further than into the South 
German armies. It has made itself felt in civil 
life in increasing measure, as is only natural. 
When men, by reason of the coat they wear, 
deem themselves sacrosanct and especially priv- 
ileged, they are bound to have imitators in 
plenty, not only among those subordinated to 
them, but those whose garments are of the un- 
uniformed multitude. The aggressive tone of the 
typical lieutenant is quickly caught, and so is his 



68 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

total lack of consideration for others. For in- 
stance, the rules of his caste make it impossible 
for him to carry a bundle or a bag for his wife, 
so she must lug it by his side, and there are many 
similarly odd customs. The habits of officers 
of the fashionable regiments do not help a young 
officer to a real respect for womankind, and the 
frequent marriage-a-la-mode for money to pay 
debts, or to support one's station in military 
life, does not tend toward morality or happiness. 
If he escape these perils, the young officer is in 
danger of becoming the conceited or silly snob 
whom the Fliegende Blatter satirizes so perfectly. 
No one has yet, however, measured the whole 
effect of these tendencies upon the German 
nation. The roughness and the coarseness of 
the barracks and the supercilious attitude of the 
officers as a class are without doubt in part re- 
sponsible for the arrogance and bad manners 
which are so often noticed by foreigners in 
G-erman travellers, and are freely deprecated 
by the more refined and thoughtful Germans. 
One meets Americans and English in numbers 
abroad who can also be trying indeed; no 
country, alas, has a monopoly of purse-proud 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 69 

travelling nouveaux riches or vulgar vacation- 
trippers; but many observers of Germany dur- 
ing the last three decades have been struck with 
the fact that German bad manners often go 
hand in hand with an assumption of superiority 
which is extremely trying, and may properly 
be connected with a similar military manner 
that an American often finds utterly unbear- 
able. Among the masses, upon whom the three- 
year military service does have some excellent 
effects, their schooling under the overbearing 
non-commissioned officers is often to be traced 
by the spread among them of the unpleasant 
traits of the barracks. It may even be asked 
whether certain unsparing, roughshod methods 
of the nation's soldiers in Belgium, as well as 
the many offensive utterances in the press 
which have made so many Americans rub their 
eyes and say, "This is not the Germany that 
I knew years ago," are not due to a subconscious 
influence of the military spirit. Certainly, un- 
checked military authority invariably leads to 
an arrogant and tyrannical spirit which may be 
more or less inseparable from the military caste 
with its sharp social distinctions and clearly 



70 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

divided grades. Our own American army has 
often had to bear with precisely this sort of 
charge, and the allegation that it falls far be- 
hind the French in its lack of democracy and a 
due consideration by the officers for the en- 
listed men has also been made at times. 

As for Germany, it may well be asked whether 
an army which by its very existence creates 
fear and militaristic rivalry, which forever talks 
war, can be either a democratic force or, in the 
long run, a sound educational influence. As an 
educational system it may have certain merits, 
but even German professors would hardly deny 
that it is bought at a heavy cost to the school 
system of the empire, and, lately, to the univer- 
sity world, for some of the greatest schools of 
learning find themselves hampered and pinched. 
If there are underpaid common-school teachers 
anywhere, they live in Germany, and particu- 
larly in Bavaria. The genteel poverty of these 
men who have to exist upon their pay is one of 
the great tragedies of life under the Kaiser. 
But the economic waste of the army is a chief 
stumbling-block to any betterment in their con- 
dition, precisely as the millions it costs prevent 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 71 

reforms in many other directions. It would 
seem as if it would be better to have the Krupps 
earn less than twelve or fourteen per cent per 
annum and the school-teachers a little more. 
It would be better to be less eflScient as a nation 
to the extent that that eflBciency is created by 
the army, and for the masses to be happier, 
with a consequent decrease of a million or so 
in the Social-Democratic voters. As long as 
they can roll up four millions of votes and still 
protest against militarism, even though swept 
off their feet in war-time, all cannot be well with 
a culture founded on military force. That their 
voices and many others will again be uplifted to 
protest against war and armies when peace re- 
turns, is the one thing that is certain about this 
war. 

In no such military and bureaucratic atmos- 
phere as exists in Germany does democracy 
thrive ! Instead, we have the tradition that as 
the German Empire is the army's creation so 
the nation's future is dependent wholly upon it. 
Imitating the ninety-three savants, three thou- 
sand German teachers in universities and schools 
of technology have put their names to the 



72 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

statement that there is no other spirit in the 
army save that of the nation; that the spirit of 
German knowledge and mihtarism are the same; 
that the German army and the German univer- 
sities are identical in their aspirations, since 
both are devoted to science. They, too, ap- 
parently cannot understand that a culture 
which exists only by reason of the arms behind 
it is no more a normal, healthy growth than is 
an industry artificially created by a protective 
tariff, and kept alive solely by receiving part 
or all of its profits by the favor of a treasury. 
They belie their own culture, because it is a free 
growth while service in the army is compulsory, 
and compulsory service of the German type may 
be universal but it is not democratic. Again, 
this sudden assertion that Germany is wholly 
dependent upon her army for safety is the his- 
toric argument of decadent peoples relying en- 
tirely upon mercenaries. Is the German de- 
mocracy of intellect so without any sources of 
strength within itself that it cannot flourish 
save by grace of the militarists.^ We believe 
that when the present Rausch (intoxication) of 
the German people is at an end their intellectual 



MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 73 

leaders will be the first to deny this interdepend- 
ence of their realm with another so material- 
istic, so mediaeval, so autocratic, with such bar- 
barous aims as conquest by blood and iron and 
man-killing by the hundred thousand. 



IV 

THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 

FOR all Americans who have sat at the feet 
of Germany's great teachers and profited 
by their wisdom, there is no more sorrow- 
ful side to the war than the injury she has done 
to herself as a seat of learning. It seems almost 
incredible that it is precisely the German teach- 
ers who are producing a most unpleasant im- 
pression on this side of the water in their efforts 
to win American public opinion for their cause, 
but such is the case. Nowhere is there any 
evidence of a desire on their part to undertake 
an unbiassed investigation of facts; nowhere 
proof of a philosophical examination of recent 
occurrences. Logic is thrown to the winds. 
We are treated to a flood of rhetoric and of un- 
supported statements. The assertions of the 
Allies are flung away as unbelievable, because 
they are from the Allies; the assumption being 
that the Germans alone are capable of telling 

74 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 75 

the truth in this crisis, and that from the rest 
of the world there comes nothing but falsehood. 
This failure to deal with the fundamental moral 
questions from a detached, ethical point of 
view may be the inevitable result of the wave 
of patriotism that has swept over Germany, 
but it is none the less amazing. The world had 
a right to expect better things, even if it could 
not hope for calmness in such a national crisis. 
Was it not from the German universities that 
we of the United States learned everything we 
know as to the laboratory method of inquiry 
in scientific, economic, and historical fields? 
Does not that presuppose a cold assembling of 
all the facts prior to the forming of a judgment ? 
And has not every German professor heretofore 
been dedicated to the pursuit of truth uninflu- 
enced by emotion, without regard to the injury 
which thereby may inure to any preconceived 
theory, and without consideration of the cher- 
ished opinions of the unthinking mass ? 

Some of the professors who have rushed into 
print to defend Germany's cause have done her 
quite as much harm as the enemy. Take, for 
instance, the appeal "To the Civilized World," 



76 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

published by ninety-three German savants. 
Some of the most distinguished names in Ger- 
many are signed to it — Eucken, Haeckel, 
Fulda, Humperdinck, Sudermann, Hauptmann, 
Lamprecht, Kaulbach, Dorpfeld — every one 
notable in his field. Yet the appeal itself is 
discreditable to their intelligence, and certain 
to react against their cause, and this quite 
aside from the fact that the English in which 
it is couched is grotesque. Their statement is 
marked by a total absence of logic. Thus they 
state that "it is not true that we trespassed 
in neutral Belgium. It has been proved that 
France and England had resolved on such a 
trespass, and it has likewise been proved that 
Belgium had agreed to their doing so. It 
would have been suicide on our part not to 
have been beforehand." 

Here, in the first sentence they deny what 
they admit in the last. As for their assertions 
in regard to France and England, no proof 
whatever is offered, or has been offered, from 
any source. The worst that has been proved 
is the fact that England and France had planned 
how they would act if Germany did precisely 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 77 

what she has done. To say that it was a viola- 
tion of neutrahty for England and France to 
plot in advance how, if necessary, they would 
perform the duties put upon them by the treaty 
establishing Belgian neutrality is to offend the 
intelligence. More than that, it appears from 
a letter of Baron Griendl, for years Belgian am- 
bassador at Berlin, to the Belgian foreign min- 
ister that in 1911 Belgium was planning how to 
resist England if she should be the first to vio- 
late Belgian territory. But granting, for the 
sake of argument, that the professors' conten- 
tion is true, what does it boil down to.^ That 
Germany violated a law because some one else 
was going to. If anybody was going to murder 
Belgian neutrality, she was going to be first at 
the job. What a shocking position for moral- 
ists, for teachers of ethics and religion, to as- 
sume ! They had much better fall back openly 
upon the highwayman's argument used by the 
German chancellor that he preferred the law 
of necessity to that laid down in a "mere scrap 
of paper." 

This attempt to justify a wrong by facts dis- 
covered after the wrong was committed, is only 



78 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

a little less amazing than some of the excuses 
given for it immediately after the attack upon 
Liege. Then it was first alleged that fifty 
automobile loads of French officers crossed into 
Belgium before any German troops entered; 
next that German cargo-ships had been held up 
by the Belgians; next it was declared that 
French aeroplanes had violated Belgian sover- 
eignty; and then it was asserted in round terms 
that among the prisoners taken in the forts at 
Liege and Namur were officers and men of vari- 
ous French regiments, who had evidently been 
there prior to the declaration of war. The 
number and position of these men vary with 
every telling; but while we have had photo- 
graphs of British dum-dum bullets, and of the 
letter of a British colonel confessing his use of 
these forbidden missiles, we have had no photo- 
graphs of these particular French soldiers. No 
list of the officers thus found in guilty relation- 
ship to the Belgian forts has been forthcoming; 
in brief, no official proof has been vouchsafed. 
It has not even been included among the wrong- 
doings of the Allies which have been officially 
called to the attention of the President of the 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 79 

United States by Ambassador von Bernstorff 
and his imperial master. Yet the ninety-three 
German savants do not hesitate to assert, upon 
their honor, that there was no breach of neu- 
trahty whatever. The world may rub its eyes 
if it pleases, but there was no neutrality to 
breach; if the world did not know this before 
the present time, then the world was far behind 
the all-knowing German General Staff. That 
the ninety-three professors thereby deliberately 
contradict the German chancellor's statement 
that there was a violation of the law of nations 
is merely so much the worse for the chancellor, 
who doubtless spoke in hot haste without pre- 
vious professorial consultation. 

Next, the ninety-three professors insist that 
the Allies are attacking not German militarism 
but German civilization, which exists only by 
reason of the bayonets with which it bristles. 
What are we to think of all the German teach- 
ings of philosophy and ethics and religion if 
this be true .? What kind of civilization is that 
which rests only upon force, and how valuable 
is it going to be in the long run ? "Have faith 
in us," the appeal concludes — faith that they 



80 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

will recover their senses. Faith, yes; but how 
can one have faith in their judgments here- 
after ? It would be easy to cite many similarly 
astonishing utterances from professors, in which 
men of international reputation accept as facts 
matters for which no proof whatever is offered 
or can be offered. Were they to carry on their 
teaching or their scientific researches in any 
such manner they would be promptly expelled 
from their chairs.* But it is not only the Ger- 
man professors at home who are hurting their 
cause in the eyes of Americans. There is on 
this side of the Atlantic Professor Mtinsterberg, 
a useful friend to the Allies, if unconsciously so, 
and there is his Harvard confrere, Professor 
Kuno Francke. Only a few years ago the latter 
was writing books showing a complete hostility 
to Kaiser, bureaucracy, and militarism. Now 
Germany in his eyes is almost beyond criticism. 
I Professor Eugen Kuhnemann, an exchange 
professor from Breslau, asserted in an address 
in Boston, in September, that Germany ought 

* Proof of this is to be found in Prof. Karl Lamprecht's recent ad- 
dress in Berlin, in which he said that with the beginning of the war 
"the whole world was informed that the Germans are very fine fel- 
lows; in this correspondence-competition the professors took the palm. 
The result was dreadful; not only was there nothing gained, but much 
harm was done." 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 81 

not to have violated Belgian territory, but had 
to do it. This called forth laughter from his 
audience, and a pointed remark from the chair- 
man as to the professor's irrationality. To this 
the agile professor genially replied that "Amer- 
icans did not seem to understand that life was 
always irrational " ! That Americans could only 
hope to understand Germany if we were situated 
in America as Germany is in Europe, was an- 
other of his contentions. Germany, declared 
Professor Kuhnemann, is "very much satisfied 
with the state civilization has reached within her 
country"; and he added: "German mihtarism is 
the concentrated power of self-defense against a 
world of enemies." If it is true that Germany 
as a whole was menaced by enemies, it was 
certainly not true of her learned men. Never 
was there a group of savants who had won so 
many men's affections and gratitude in every 
country in the world as had German university 
teachers prior to the 1st of August, 1914. If 
there were only enemies confronting their coun- 
try, it would seem as if a scientific inquiry into 
what classes of Germans, or what national pol- 
icies, were rousing such dangerous antipathies, 
might long ago have been in order. 



82 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Fortunately, there are some signs that the 
excesses of this furor of the intellectuals have 
begun to cause a reaction at home. Thus the 
BerUn Tageblatt speaks of it as a "war neurosis" 
{Krieg's Neurose), and affirms that it is every- 
where "assuming serious proportions." "The 
injury," it adds, "that it does in the camps of 
our foes does not concern us, but we should 
gladly see its effects in our own house dimin- 
ished." It also remarks that, while the victims 
of this disease in hostile lands — and it cites the 
cases of many sorely afflicted in Switzerland, 
Italy, Portugal, Russia, England, and France — 
are careful not to hurt the feelings of neutral 
states, the German sufferers from the epidemic 
seem to go out of their way to deliver their 
blows "on the stomachs of neutrals," with the 
result that they are increasing the enormous 
difficulties with which Germany is confronted. 
Some of the German so-called intellectual lead- 
ers have, it declares, "less political insight than 
the youngest attache of a legation. . . . They 
forget too easily that the welfare of our soldiers, 
and the power to see the war through, depend 
upon a hundred preliminary conditions of ma- 
terial worth, and that in this bitterly earnest 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 83 

battle no means of aid can be spared and no 
friendship is to be treated as negligible." Then 
it admonishes the nation to seek better political 
knowledge, and it answers those of its fellow 
countrymen who cannot go to the front and ask 
what they can do to bridge over the agony of 
this terrible time with the single word: "Learn." 
It is praiseworthy advice. 

But with the German Gelehrtenwelt thus swept 
from its moorings, it was, of course, impossible 
to expect anything else from the press, or from 
those volunteer societies "for spreading abroad 
the truth about Germany," and the official 
bodies which are mailing to every ascertainable 
address printed matter exposing EngHsh mis- 
representations and presenting their holy cause 
as they see it. The systematic way in which 
this propaganda has been carried on is charac- 
teristically German, but in its execution it has 
lacked accuracy, good judgment, and correct 
form. Special editions of newspapers in Ger- 
man and English containing official despatches 
and summaries of the news of the war up to the 
time of pubHcation have been of great value. 
This cannot be said of such publications as 
"The Truth about Germany," a pamphlet 



84 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

which has burdened the mail in repeated edi- 
tions, and has even been placed on sale upon 
our news-stands, besides having been reprinted 
in full by one of our New York dailies. 

It contains much that is true about Germany 
and much that is false, or that conveys false 
impressions about the war and its origin. Again 
we have outright assertions of happenings and 
motives, without a shadow of proof to support 
them. Thus, we learn that Servia was on the 
point of accepting Austria's demands, "when 
there arrived a despatch from St. Petersburg, 
and Servia mobilized," the fact being, of course, 
that Servia did agree to everything which 
Austria demanded except two conditions, which 
it offered to submit to arbitration, but that 
Austria at once declared the war for which her 
militarists had so long been thirsting. Again, 
there appeared the flat falsehood that Great 
Britain "asked that Germany should allow 
French and Belgian troops to form on Belgian 
territory for a march against our [the German] 
frontier." The familiar, unsupported charge 
that England encouraged the war likewise ap- 
pears. It is with such stuff that the German 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 85 

public has been fed, and returning American 
travellers regaled; it is such stujff that has over- 
burdened our mails — with complete lack of 
appreciation of the fact that the American is a 
reasoning animal who recognizes a logical ab- 
surdity when he sees one, and knows the differ- 
ence between a substantiated fact and an asser- 
tion. 

And always this deluge of pro-German litera- 
ture flows on, as if the German side were not 
getting a hearing in the American press. In 
the sixth month of the war letters are still 
coming from prominent Germans, men and 
women of affairs and of international experience, 
which are based on the assumption that, as the 
German cables were cut, America is seeing only 
through British spectacles. But, as already 
pointed out, the German cause has had numer- 
ous advocates, of whom the ablest is unquestion- 
ably Doctor Bernhard Dernburg, the former 
minister of colonies, whose years of residence in 
New York as a young man have apparently 
made him understand the best method of ap- 
pealing to the American public. But besides 
these spokesmen, besides the tons of specially 



86 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

prepared literature which have been poured in 
upon us, the mails have brought letters and 
newspapers with amazing regularity and as- 
tounding profusion. Every stay-at-home in 
Germany with a friend in the United States has 
felt it a patriotic duty to write to that friend. 
Meanwhile, the circulation of our German news- 
papers, like the Staats-Zeitung, has everywhere 
gone up by leaps and bounds; they are being sold 
on the streets as never before; so, also, in New 
York, has been the Berliner Tageblatt. And 
all are being bought by thousands who favor 
the Allies, for the express purpose of hearing 
both sides, '\^^lat our German friends still 
cannot seem to realize, and what will bear repe- 
tition here, is that American pubhc opinion 
was not made up by reports of outrages by 
German troops, or as a result of the stupid and 
even disgraceful falsifications and suppressions 
of the British censors — against whom not only 
the Germans but the newspapers of America 
have a just grievance; that it was not formed 
by emotion or by a hereditary affection for 
England, but by a calm study of the facts. No 
fair-minded person can contend to-day that the 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 87 

American attitude is due to ignorance or to de- 
ception from any source. 

In view of all this, American friends of Ger- 
many may well ask themselves whether the 
time has not come to found, on this side of the 
water, societies for the spreading of the real 
truth about Germany — "facts concerning the 
war" — not, however, for action within the 
United States, but in Germany. There is abun- 
dant material for such a propaganda, and there 
is nothing in the situation which would prevent 
its being presented in an entirely helpful and 
friendly spirit. Thus, it might be suggested that 
a nation in arms, in the excitement of such a 
national calamity, is never in the frame of mind 
to render impartial judgments upon its own 
acts. If examples of this were needed, it would 
be simple enough to point to the unreasoning 
excitement of the bulk of the American people 
and their yellow- journal inciters to war in the 
period, in 1898, between the blowing up of the 
Maine and the declaration of hostilities, and to 
show how our public opinion in regard to the 
Philippines underwent a remarkable chastening 
after the delirious days of May, 1898, when the 



88 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

country was dazzled by the thought that the 
sun would thenceforth never set on the American 
flag. Similarly, the exaltation of the French 
nation in 1870, with its full belief in the justice 
of its cause, underwent a complete transforma- 
tion when victory failed to perch upon its ban- 
ners. It will be hard, of course, to induce Ger- 
many to apply any lessons to herself from the 
experience of others, for, as Professor Kuhne- 
mann indicates, she is so self-satisfied, so cer- 
tain that her Kultur surpasses any other, that 
she may feel it beneath her to think that she 
might profit by lessons drawn from abroad. 
Nevertheless, the effort is worth making. Al- 
ready the German press and soldiers are begin- 
ning to admit that they held a totally erroneous 
view of their English soldier antagonists, the 
despised English "hirelings"; that they under- 
estimated the strength of the Russians and the 
ability of their leaders. As the evident miscal- 
culations of the German General Staff and their 
country's diplomatic blunders begin to dawn 
upon them, their minds may be opened a little 
to arguments and facts which make against 
their contentions. 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 89 

Even now, however, a genuine service would 
be rendered if there could be brought to Ger- 
many's attention the simple facts of her own 
censorship, with its refusal to permit criticism 
of the powers that be. Few Germans seem to 
know that their own diplomatic despatches were 
not always printed in full, but appeared as edited 
by the authorities. So far as has been ascer- 
tained, no German publication of the complete 
English and French documents has been at- 
tempted; the public has learned of them almost 
wholly through partisan comments by their own 
editors. Thus, the writer has been unable to 
discover in the German papers to which he has 
had access any fair discussion or publication of 
Belgium's official statement of her side of the 
case, and the documents bearing thereon. Of 
all the literature of the war, nothing is more 
impressive and convincing than this. But the 
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, for one, made haste 
to abridge and bury it in an inconspicuous place. 
True, it might be waved aside upon the familiar 
assumption that all else is lies save what is 
German or Austrian ; yet we cannot but believe 
that, if there is anything left whatever of the 



90 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

old German devotion to scientific truth, its 
perusal must at least recall to the reader's 
mind that there are two sides to every case. 

It would certainly do no German any harm 
to-day if he should learn that on the 29th of 
April, 1913, Herr von Jagow, Secretary of State, 
declared at the meeting of the Budget Com- 
mittee of the Reichstag: "Belgium's neutrality 
is provided for by international convention, and 
Germany is determined to respect those con- 
ventions." He might also read that on August 
2, 1914, the German minister at Brussels, Herr 
von Below-Selaske, stated to the Belgian min- 
ister for foreign affairs that he had not been in- 
structed to make an official communication, 
"but that we (the Belgian Government) knew 
his personal opinion as to the feelings of security 
which we had the right to entertain toward our 
eastern neighbors." "I at once replied," said 
the Belgian minister, "that we knew their in- 
tentions, as indicated in numerous previous 
conversations, did not allow us to doubt their 
perfect correctness toward Belgium." Yet on 
the same date, the same German minister at 
Brussels presented the German ultimatum which 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 91 

resulted in the violation of Belgian neutral- 
ity ! 

It would also not be amiss for those Germans 
who ponder over the failure of the neutral na- 
tions to sympathize with Germany, to read once 
more the telegraan of the Kaiser to the King of 
England, of August 1, 1914, in which the Kaiser 
says: "The troops on my frontier are in the act 
of being stopped by telegraph and telephone 
from crossing into France.''^ The significance of 
this to American readers lies in the Kaiser's 
astounding admission that mobilization against 
France meant immediate invasion of France 
before any declaration of war. Had this fact 
been publicly known or really understood in 
Germany, it ought surely to have prevented 
the repeated assertions that France began the 
war by sending her aviators over German terri- 
tory, by the entrance of armed patrols, a sudden 
attack in Lorraine, etc. For it is evident from 
the Kaiser's own words that long-prepared 
orders to invade French soil sent some of his 
troops onto it the instant the first order to 
mobilize appeared. Whether those troops did 
any damage or not, or reached French territory 



92 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

or not, before war was declared, is unimportant. 
The intent to rush right onto French soil before 
peace was officially ended is here admitted. It 
is thoroughly in keeping with the conversation 
of General von Moltke, in May, 1913, reported 
by the French ambassador to Berlin, that "we 
[the Germans] must begin war without waiting, 
in order brutally to crush all resistance." This 
has been denied in Germany, but it is in keep- 
ing with the attitude of leading militarists, and 
was, perhaps, one of the bits of evidence that 
led Italy to reject outright Germany's claim that 
Italy must come to her aid because she had been 
attacked. At any rate, the German propagan- 
dists who seek to conquer hostile American opin- 
ion must find some way of getting around the 
Kaiser's despatch. Its revelation of what Ger- 
man mobilization really meant does, however, in 
some degree explain why it was that the Kaiser 
and his military associates were so alarmed by 
the mere fact of Russian mobilization. 

The German public could never have learned 
from *'The Truth about Germany" what it 
probably does not clearly understand to-day, 
that the Kaiser's government sent ultimata to 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 98 

Paris and to Petrograd on the very day upon 
which Russia had offered to "maintain a wait- 
ing attitude" if Austria would "stay the march 
of her troops" into Servia, and permit the Great 
Powers to examine what satisfaction Servia 
could give to Austro-Hungary "without injury 
to her rights as a sovereign state and to her in- 
dependence." Americans certainly have had to 
learn of this from other than German sources. 
Would it not be a fitting return for the earnest 
efforts made to cure us of our ignorance if an 
American truth society should circulate this 
widely in Germany.^ 

Again, without wishing to be critical or to 
injure anybody, such a society might be of 
value by reminding the German pubHc that, ex- 
cellent as its press is, it has nevertheless been 
guilty of that tendency to print falsities which 
is an inevitable accompaniment of war. The 
mere existence of a rigid censorship puts a 
premium upon rumor and scandalous accusa- 
tions against the enemy, of which both sides 
have been victims in this war. Did not an 
official German despatch report the British 
army surrounded.? Has not the increase and 



94 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

decrease in the number of Russian prisoners in 
Germany presented a mathematical puzzle ? 
As for the prophecies and reports in regard to 
events in South Africa, Ireland, India, Egypt, 
and the Caucasus, to say nothing of Turkey, 
and the Holy War, a compilation of these would 
make sorry reading to-day even if it be ad- 
mitted — as it must be in all fairness — that 
the news of the German press and German 
official despatches have proved, as a whole, 
more reliable than those of Russia, or France, 
or England. But it is emphatically a case of 
the pot calling the kettle black; a vast amount 
of misinformation has everywhere seen the hght 
— which makes our proposed American propa- 
ganda in Germany all the more inviting. 

One of the first tasks would have to be the 
refuting of the long article published m the 
Vossische Zeitung by Doctor Ludwig Stein, en- 
titled "The Change of Opinion in America." 
In this extraordinary screed he maintains that 
there has been a complete reversal of our judg- 
ment upon the war, thanks to the pro-German 
propaganda of Doctor Dernburg and others, 
and to Count von Bernstorff's capture of the 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 95 

worst of our American journalists — with whom 
not even a sorely tried ambassador ought, be it 
said in passing, to associate. Our American 
society would have to seek to make it clear 
that this sort of misinformation does infinite 
harm when reprinted in America because it pro- 
duces the impression that German publicists 
are quite untrustworthy. Similarly, our Ameri- 
can society would have to explain early in its 
propaganda that efforts to make Americans 
understand that Bernhardi's book was known 
only to a handful of readers, that it was almost 
wholly unknown in university circles, and is 
to-day not to be found in many important 
German libraries, are gravely handicapped by 
such a speech as that recently made by the 
commanding general in Hamburg, Major-Gen- 
eral von Roehl. Speaking under the statue of 
Kaiser Wilhelm I, and, he said, exactly in the 
spirit of the great Kaiser's grandson, Wilhelm 
II, he declared: *'We shall not again sheathe 
our sharp and just sword until the last of our 
enemies recognizes that only one people has 
the right to play a leading part in the political 
world, and that people is the German people." 



96 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

When Americans read this they not unnaturally 
feel that while this may be largely soldier brag- 
gadocio, the ineffable nonsense which is an in- 
evitable accompaniment of militarism gone mad, 
it nevertheless bears out those who assert that, 
if Bernhardiism is but little known in German 
academic circles, it has permeated the German 
army and insidiously affected the leaders of 
political thought to a greater extent than any- 
body had realized until the explosion came. 

If General von Roehl is to be dismissed merely 
as a military blockhead, like some of our Amer- 
ican talking generals, Professor Ernst Haeckel 
cannot be thus waved away. Our American 
society for informing Germany could have no 
more pressing duty than to make German edi- 
tors understand that Professor Haeckel injures 
not merely his own high and international re- 
pute, but that of all Germany as well, when he 
calmly sets down this programme as his view of 
what steps Germany should take to "reorganize 
Europe on Teutonic lines" when victory is hers: 

"1. The crushing of the English tyranny. 

"2. The invasion of Great Britain and the 
occupation of London. 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 97 

"3. The division of Belgium. The largest 
portion, from Ostend to Antwerp in the west, to 
be a confederated German state; the northern 
part to be given to Holland; the southeastern 
part to be given to Luxemburg, which thus en- 
larged becomes also a confederated German 
state. 

"4. A large number of the British colonies 
and the Congo Free State to go to Germany. 

"5. France to surrender to Germany some of 
her northeastern frontier provinces. 

"6. Russia to be rendered impotent by the 
reconstitution, under Austrian auspices, of the 
kingdom of Poland. 

"7. The German provinces of the Baltic to 
be returned to the German Empire. 

"8. Finland, united with Sweden, to become 
an independent kingdom." 

Our proposed society could not be too earnest 
in impressing upon its German listeners that 
when such a programme, with its cold-blooded 
division of Belgium, is published over here it 
strikes fire from every honest American heart, 
however inconsistently — or consistently — the 
head above that heart may view our holding 



98 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the Philippines despite the protests of the Fil- 
ipino people. 

Next, our society for spreading the truth 
abroad could point out to German leaders of 
thought that the very furor of their foreign 
propaganda bespeaks genuine provincialism; 
that it is as dangerous to defend too much as 
to protest too much. The very certainty of 
their own superiority which they voice also sug- 
gests the desirability of a nearer view and a 
keener understanding of other people's Kultur. 
To Americans it inevitably recalls the boasting 
of the Confederates in 1861, and their loud and 
truculent assertions that the culture of their 
aristocracy of wealth and land founded upon 
slave labor was superior to any the world had 
ever seen. German glorification of their own 
greatness if anything surpasses that 1861 out- 
burst of self-praise. One usually sound thinker 
insists: "We are morally and intellectually 
superior beyond all comparison as to our organi- 
zations and institutions. . . . We Germans 
have no friends anywhere, because we are ef- 
ficient and morally superior to all.'' Then we 
have the Kreuz Zeitung, the organ of the mili- 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 99 

tary, saying that "The world can be revitalized, 
society ennobled and refined, only through the 
German spirit. The world must for its own 
salvation be Germanized." 

Just as the Germans are coming to change 
their opinion about their British antagonists, so 
did the Confederates speedily forget their early 
boasts that one Rebel could account for six 
Yankees. As the Confederates, equally cer- 
tain of the justice of their cause, and equally 
united, came to face the world in 1865 with a 
new point of view, and without their early be- 
lief in their own superiority because of King 
Cotton, so must the German point of view 
undergo a radical sea change before this great 
struggle ends. It would be quite as proper for 
our society for spreading the truth to prepare 
the way for this in Germany by judicious his- 
torical parallels, as it is for Germans to en- 
deavor to convince Americans that it is right 
for a great nation to trample under foot another 
people because in her judgment her welfare 
demands that the weaker shall pay the price. 

Thus one might point out indefinitely the 
tempting opportunity which would loom up 



100 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

before our proposed organization. For years 
to come — if the war should last long — it 
would have subjects galore. The least of its 
tasks would be to point out to our Teuton 
brethren that it aids their case not at all to con- 
vict Great Britain of hypocrisy, as Treitschke 
endeavors to do, or any one else of inconsistency. 
No one who really beheves in liberty will par- 
don England for her treatment of the Boers, or 
her shameless connivance at the violating of 
Persia. But guilty humanity moves forward to 
higher ideals by fits and starts; to the neutral 
world the devotion of the British people to the 
idealistic defense of Belgium, which has been 
assumed by her ministers as the real cause of 
the war, seems something to be acclaimed. The 
peace treaty may, of course, show that this as- 
serted cause cloaks for England's rulers merely 
a sordid desire to crush down their most danger- 
ous trade rival, as the Germans contend. But 
meanwhile the outsider must take it at its face 
value when he sees millions of British citizens 
ready to give up their lives unselfishly in behalf 
of this principle of the sacredness of the existence 
of small nations, and must assume that here- 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 101 

after the weaker countries will at least be safe 
frora British lust of land. Even a sudden Brit- 
ish conversion is better than no conversion at 
all; however the Germans may rail, the neutral 
world is not disposed to cavil at the spectacle 
of a great nation, whatever its past, ready to 
bleed near to death, if need be, that a smaller 
may live. 

Then, some one in Germany ought to direct 
German attention to the case of France. She 
has found it necessary to initiate no propaganda 
abroad in behalf of her soldiery, her motives, or 
her policy. Not for an hour has her President 
had to worry as to what the neutral world would 
think of her. It regrets, of course, that so 
great a nation was compelled to war merely be- 
cause of an accursed treaty with as autocratic 
a power as Russia — with which the real soul 
of France can have no genuine spiritual com- 
munion. But the onlookers abroad know that 
France has borne herself with rare dignity and 
restraint; that her moral position is clearer and 
more shining than that of any other of the com- 
batants; that she has revealed a fortitude in 
defeat and a resoluteness to succeed in the end 



102 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

which, together with unexpected qualities of 
self-control, command the admiration of all 
who behold with unprejudiced eyes. The na- 
tion of Lafayette, of De Grasse, of Rocham- 
beau, has lived up to its very best. 

An American society which attempted to say 
this might just now have a rather sorry time in 
Germany. It could at least certify that Maxi- 
milian Harden comes close to the truth when, 
in giving up the effort to win over Americans 
to his country's cause, he admits that we are 
well informed as to the German arguments, but 
cannot be convinced because we cannot think 
like Germans. It would note with regret that 
the Deutsche Tageszeitung thus wrongly counsels 
its countrymen: "We, however, do not need to 
regard the public opinion of the world. In the 
last instance, the German people, united with 
the Emperor, are alone competent to decide the 
correctness of Germany's cause," for it would 
be its duty to point out that no country is strong 
enough to-day to do without the favorable 
opinion of all mankind. As for Herr Harden, 
perhaps he, too, may yet see that if Americans 
cannot think like Germans just now, it is be- 



THE PROPAGANDA IN AMERICA 103 

cause their love of fair play, their historic sym- 
pathy for those who battle for liberty, yes, their 
institutions, forbid. 



V 

THE KAISER AND THE WAR 

FEW masters of nations have been as 
heartily abused or as highly praised as 
the Kaiser. In this respect he invites 
comparison with the first Napoleon; in the case 
of both emperors the extremes of praise and 
blame have been unjust. Americans, on the 
whole, have been rather disposed to patronize 
the Kaiser. Thus, one of our captains of in- 
dustry assured the head of the HohenzoUern 
that he would go well in tandem with Theodore 
Roosevelt. When the Kaiser quickly asked, 
"Which would be the wheel-horse.^" the mag- 
nate was trapped and at a loss to answer. An 
entertaining magazine writer condescendingly 
assured us that the Kaiser *'is of the stuff that 
would have made a first-rate American," and 
"the real Kaiser" has been done for us more 
than once, usually with a liberal percentage of 
error, not unmixed with considerable respect 

104 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 105 

for his achievements. The average American 
is apt to consider that a king is necessarily a 
mere lay figure; hence the surprise one notes 
when one of our countrymen has come into con- 
tact with the Kaiser and found him to be not 
merely a wearer of innumerable uniforms, and 
an egotistical defender of the divine rights of 
sovereigns, but a many-sided man of ability as 
remarkable as the contradictions in his char- 
acter, his words, and his conduct. 

Extraordinary has been the development of 
his personality by reason of his responsibilities 
and his powers. This is not always the case 
with commoners or with royalty, as the present 
Czar of Russia proves quite well enough. When 
the Kaiser ascended the throne, after the 
tragically brief reign and still more tragic death 
of his father, few outside of the Prince's imme- 
diate entourage suspected the latent possibilities 
of his mind, or the inherent force of his charac- 
ter. Until his father's illness the possibility 
of his succession had seemed so remote that few 
thought it worth while to pay much attention 
to the Prince of Prussia, just become Crown 
Prince. Those men in public life who had 



106 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

studied him feared him, because of some im- 
periahstic speeches which are recalled now to 
show that his callow, eldest son is rightfully the 
heir of his own boyish point of view. There 
was as much dread lest he plunge Germany into 
war when he ascended the throne as there was 
similar fear in certain circles in America when 
the assassin's bullet made Mr. Roosevelt Presi- 
dent. In both instances the fear was not justi- 
fied. Mr. Roosevelt kept the peace, and so did 
the Kaiser for twenty-six years of his reign. 

No one who was not in Germany at the time 
can fully appreciate the shock to the entire 
country when Bismarck was dismissed like a 
lackey, as Bismarck himself put it. That the 
Kaiser was able to live this down and so win 
the affections of his people that this is not laid 
up against him any longer, must be regarded as 
perhaps his greatest personal achievement; for 
at the time it seemed like laying ruthless hands 
upon what was most sacred in the life of the 
young nation, or turning it adrift on uncharted 
seas for which there was no pilot, since the 
public had somehow come to feel that this dis- 
missed pilot was going to live on forever. Yet 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 107 

this was not the only time the Kaiser offended. 
He seemed unstable and constitutionally rest- 
less; striving after the new and the untried, 
seeking to govern entirely in his own way, and 
bent continually on ratthng his sabre. It is a 
long distance from that to the present day, 
when he is pictured as a conservative, as the 
greatest friend of peace among modern monarchs. 
And yet the transformation has gone on under 
our very eyes these last twenty years. 

If the Kaiser indeed proved to be a friend of 
peace until put to the supreme test, he has 
never outgrown a duality of character as marked 
as that of his nation. This duality, Prince von 
Billow asserts, explains "many a curious phe- 
nomenon in the present, as in the past," both 
in the life of the country and of its individual 
citizens. Thus the Kaiser may follow up a re- 
actionary, autocratic outburst with a speech 
both enlightened and constructive. He is at 
one moment a War Lord in utterance, garbed 
like Lohengrin, and in the next a civilian deeply 
concerned with the industrial development of 
his state. He sets his face against any democ- 
racy in the army, and — until now — against 



108 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the reception of Jews as oflBcers in any but staff 
positions, and at the same time selects the Jew 
Bernhard Dernburg to be the first imperial 
minister of his race, and makes almost an inti- 
mate of Herr Ballin, the brilliant head of the 
Hamburg-American Line. He is broad enough 
to permit officers to drink his health in water, 
and to become total abstainers if they choose, 
but too narrow to stamp out duelling among 
them. He is mediaeval one moment, and abreast 
of the times the next. One month may see him 
guilty of a dangerous political indiscretion and 
the next find him showing tact and skill in a 
political situation affecting the nation alone. 

Nor are the contradictions of his acts limited 
to domestic affairs. He was the man who or- 
dered his Pekin-bound troops to wage ferocious 
war upon the Chinese; who was quite ready to 
seize Kiau-Chau, and to legitimize the transac- 
tion by a long-term "lease," which the landlord 
did not draw and did not want, and had no 
option but to sign. He was quite willing to put 
his blood-and-iron policy into force in German 
Southwest Africa. He was as ready to have 
his generals drive thirty thousand Herreros out 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 109 

in the desert, there to die of thirst and starva- 
tion, as he was to crush Belgium when she lay 
in his path, if thereby German civihzation and 
Kultur could be maintained in that far-off, hope- 
less and hapless African colony. Yet this mas- 
ter of contrasts could send his telegram to Presi- 
dent Kruger voicing the very general condemna- 
tion of British aggression in South Africa. Effi- 
cient in administration at home in most ways, 
he and his advisers have been singularly ineffi- 
cient abroad; not, as is now alleged on their 
behalf, because their diplomats were so honest 
and guileless as constantly to be outtrumped, 
and in 1914 to be wholly overreached, but be- 
cause of disregard of other people's feehngs, 
because of such dangerous rudeness as marked 
the conduct of Admiral von Diederichs at 
Manila in 1898, because too much Prussian 
arrogance was often allowed to slip into the 
tone of diplomatic correspondence, and for still 
other reasons dwelt on elsewhere. So there are 
Germans in plenty to agree with the Berliner 
Tageblatt that this is the time for them to say 
nothing about the Kaiser's diplomats and diplo- 
macy. Only the visit of Prince Henry to the 



no GERMANY EMBATTLED 

United States stands out as particularly credit- 
able to the Kaiser's sense of the fitness of things 
abroad, which so often serves him well in home 
affairs. 

Nevertheless, during the years of his rule the 
Kaiser has steadily grown more and more pop- 
ular as he has become more conservative in his 
personality. This is partly because of his dra- 
matic skill,* and partly because of his ability to 
play on almost every one of the many strings 
that lead to the hearts of his people. The army 
is devoted to him as its War Lord, even though 
its superior oflBcers are not all convinced that 
he is a great strategist. The church people 
reverence him because of his blameless private 
life, the simplicity and purity of his family 
circle, and his religious faith and constant refer- 
ences to the Almighty in his public utterances. 
He won the hearts of all fathers and mothers by 
his exquisite speech at the wedding of his daugh- 
ter two years ago — a masterpiece of felicitous 
expression, pervaded by a note of deep affection, 

* Baron Fritz von Holstein, for sixteen years the real power behind 
the throne in the German foreign office, is said to have once remarked 
caustically that his Majesty " takes a dramatic result for a political 
success." 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 111 

and imbued with real appreciation of the true 
values of Hfe. The commercial world looks up 
to him, not because he has been solely respon- 
sible for the nation's wonderful economic devel- 
opment, as some would have it, for that would 
have come to pass if he had ruled only one year, 
but because he has identified himself with all 
its interests, and has sought to further the mar- 
vellous wave of development which was coming 
in on a rising tide when he assumed the reins. 
For the first time, its leaders have been sought 
by a Kaiser. Capitalists, too, are pleased with 
the policy of the state in regard to the great 
combinations approximating to our trusts; they 
have no such criticisms of their government as 
have had some of ours during the necessary 
period of reorganization and control by legis- 
lative enactment through which we in America 
have just passed. 

The literary, artistic, and musical worlds do 
not take the Kaiser's own creations seriously, 
but they see in him a sympathetic friend, a wise 
royal patron, even though he may have the 
poorest taste when it comes to sculptures of his 
ancestors. The Junker, the great landowners. 



112 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

and the aristocrats find him wholly satisfactory 
because of his stubborn refusal to countenance 
any radical or liberal tendencies, his opposi- 
tion to the Social-Democrats, and his upholding 
of unjust Prussian suffrage laws — defended as 
a necessary safeguard to prevent the Social- 
Democrats from capturing Prussia. The aris- 
tocrats who come to Berlin for their brief season 
of six weeks rejoice in the Emperor's rigid up- 
holding of the historic ceremonial of the court, 
and his deference to caste, even though he ad- 
mits commercial men to the intimacy of his 
yacht. 

Imperialistic professors and statesmen find 
themselves in fullest accord with his views as to 
the empire's expansion and his creation of a 
fleet, if only to "protect our oversea trade," as 
the phrase has run. Officialdom, which is the 
greatest caste in Germany next to the army, is 
wholly imbued with the idea that the Kaiser is 
the ideal ruler. So far from hurting him, his 
deliberately spectacular methods have helped 
not a little, precisely as his interest in sports 
and sailing has captured the younger genera- 
tion, and helped to give athletics as rapid and 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 113 

wide a growth in twenty-five years as that of 
any of the great industries, whose expansion 
has partaken of the phenomenal. President 
Roosevelt showed how the masses like a ruler 
who "does things every minute." The Ger- 
mans are tremendously taken by a ruler who 
cruises to the north in the summer and has a 
villa at Corfu during the winter; who sails his 
own racing yacht, commands the fleet he has 
created, and leads impossible cavalry charges 
in peace manoeuvres — all the while dabbling 
in the arts and sciences. They have long since 
forgotten that witticism which early in Wil- 
helm the Second's reign described his grand- 
father, his father, and himself as the "greise 
Kaiser," the "weise Kaiser," and the "reise 
Kaiser" (the aged Kaiser, the wise Kaiser, and 
the travelling Kaiser). 

Prince von Bulow complains because the Ger- 
mans, whenever they have found an intellectual 
formula or a system for anything, insist "with 
obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into 
the system." Truly, the Kaiser has made his 
type of ruler a reality to his people, and they 
have so readily fitted him into their system that 



114 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

they applauded him even when he declared to 
some recruits that by the oath they were taking 
"you are pledged to give your Hves to me.'* In 
this they see nothing inconsistent with the prog- 
ress and aims of what is in many matters of 
government the most advanced of states. Nor 
do they resent his incessant use of the personal 
pronoun in describing things which are the na- 
tion's, such as its army and its navy. Surely, 
there could be no greater contrast than that 
between the first and the second Emperor Wil- 
liam, yet the difference in their conceptions of 
what the headship of the nation means is, per- 
haps, a true measure of the nation's own de- 
velopment during the last quarter of a century. 
It is this very mixture of medisevaUsm, miUtary 
and civil, with progress which has brought the 
present catastrophe upon Germany. 

But the bulk of the Germans only see that in 
his person the Kaiser reflects their own efficiency 
and many of their own ideals. Whereas they 
would have been startled in 1888 at the pros- 
pect of a ruler of the type into which their Em- 
peror has developed, they find him now just the 
right representative for the nation and its world- 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 115 

power aspirations. They are, moreover, flat- 
tered by the interest or admiration he excites 
abroad, and the attention he attracts every- 
where. When they hear that as a side issue to 
the business of managing the empire he is a very 
successful business man in private enterprises, 
and learn that he has extraordinary, if undevel- 
oped, mechanical talent, they take that much 
additional pride in him. They know him, more- 
over, to be a man of unusual charm, when he 
unbends, and of great personal power, with 
keen wits, a real sense of humor, and incessant 
mental activity. They rejoice in his executive 
ability, and his rare capacity for consecutive 
labor; no loafer or idler is he, but a man who 
despatches easily and promptly masses of work. 
When he is seen in pubHc he makes a most 
pleasing impression upon his own subjects and 
upon the foreigners he meets (as is clearly evi- 
denced by the way most of our exchange pro- 
fessors have succumbed to his charms), for he 
is by no means overbearing, and he readily in- 
terests himself in the doings of the varied types 
of men who come into contact with him, and 
adopts the manner and speech the occasion re- 



116 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

quires. Indeed, the bombastic speeches which 
he addresses to his soldiers and sailors are just 
what such an audience wishes to hear. In 
brief, the whole country likes to be bossed by 
so interesting and brilliant a personality, just as 
Americans for similar reasons tolerated doings 
and sayings in Mr. Roosevelt while in office that 
would have ruined any President who was less 
entertaining, less energetic, less vital. 

Outside of the Socialists and the Radicals, 
few seem to be able to resist the Kaiser's vigor 
and charm, or to stop to analyze and inquire 
whither his political philosophy and his auto- 
cratic theory of governing are leading the coun- 
try. No one else, of course, paints him as such 
an unspeakable wretch as have the British news- 
papers, which are repeating, after a century, 
their falsifications about the first Napoleon; 
or believes such abominable libels about the 
Kaiser's sons as that they have robbed, after 
the manner of common thieves, the castles in 
which they have sojourned in France. But 
there were Germans in plenty prior to the out- 
break of this war who did dissent from the 
Kaiser's policies, like the hundreds of thousands 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 117 

of Germans who vote the Social-Democratic 
ticket because there is no other effective medium 
of protest. They vote thereby against the Jun- 
ker, against mihtarism, against the protective 
tariff, and the obstacles which, put in the way 
of the free importation of food, increase the cost 
of living for the struggling masses and enrich the 
prosperous Agrarians; but they do not thereby 
necessarily favor the theories of Marx. They 
seek for better conditions of life; to them rightly 
their country is not the ideal nation so many 
have painted it, and they do not like the type 
of autocrat the Kaiser represents. They do not 
forget or overlook the numerous trials for lese- 
majeste; they believe in the right of a nation 
to choose its own rulers, and they deplore the 
absence of a responsible ministry. To such as 
these the Kaiser, with all his attractiveness, 
makes little appeal; they even regard him only 
as the chief ally of those who are intrenched in 
privilege and in caste; who would run the gov- 
ernment to suit their own selfish interests, who 
are happy in the consciousness that them the 
Kaiser will not offend. 

Indeed, as an ardent reformer the Kaiser 



118 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

shines not at all. The remarkable social and 
pension legislation which has been enacted since 
Bismarck planned it in order to offset the spread 
of socialism, has come to pass, not in spite of 
the Kaiser, but without his taking any particu- 
lar interest in it. Never has he expressed any 
genuine sympathy for the common people; they 
were created for him to govern in his wisdom, 
and this he is ready to do if they will be good 
and not vote for Social-Democrats. Mr. Price 
Collier wrote of the Kaiser's "complacent neglect 
of how the work of the world is done by patient 
labor; of how the works of art are only born of 
travail and tears." He has had no grand vizier 
to take him on night strolls and show him how 
the masses of his people live, and how many of 
them often starve. The ''acrid smell of the 
homes of the poor" has never offended his nos- 
trils. They are but pawns to man his ships 
and fill his regiments, while he dwells on high 
to play with masterly skill the role of the ruler 
who owes obedience to no one, neither to 
Reichstag nor to people. It is picturesque, it is 
grand, it is done with artistic attention to de- 
tails, it gives to the nation a wonderfully paint- 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 119 

able head; but it leads nowhere, for it is directly 
contrary to that democratic current of the ages 
which flows on over kings of blood and kings of 
privilege ahke, and is certain to relegate them 
all eventually to the limbo of the outworn. 

When the war broke out, to many, in the 
first flush of a passionate sense of the injustice 
done to Germany herself by permitting her to 
take to wholesale murdering, it seemed as if 
this terrible crime against humanity must end 
one dynasty after another. Yet for the mo- 
ment, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the 
Kaiser stands higher in the esteem and affec- 
tion of his subjects than ever. They are united 
and determined; they have buried all griev- 
ances and dislikes and healed all differences for 
the hour. They turn to the Kaiser in the firm 
belief that his commanding abilities will find 
the way out; they are as content to die for him 
personally as for the state he dominates. Did 
not the crews of the lost German ships go down 
to death cheering for his Majesty with the same 
enthusiasm as for the empire ? Are not the two 
million volunteers quite ready to take him at 
his word that their lives belong to him to throw 



120 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

away as he sees fit? Doubtless were he not 
so deeply concerned with the outcome of it all, 
did not heavier cares weigh upon him to-day 
than upon any other human being, he might 
rejoice that, for the moment, in authority and, 
in the good will of the people he stands at the 
highest possible pinnacle. Socialists, Radicals, 
Liberals, Clericals, all who have cavilled in the 
past are for the nonce silenced; the Reichstag 
exists, as he would have it, merely to record his 
decrees. For the hour he is supreme. Whether 
it is or is not true that he was forced to the war 
by an ultimatum from his General Staff, and 
was then overcome by emotion and a realiza- 
tion of the frightful significance of the step he 
had taken, when one simple sentence from him 
would have preserved the peace of Europe, he 
holds in his hands to-day the immediate fate 
of his empire. There is no time now for duality 
of personality for him, or for his subjects; 
theirs can only be the role of fighting men. 

But when it is all over, what then? If it is 
to be victory, or a deadlock because of mutual 
exhaustion and inability of one side to conquer 
the other, the Kaiser's star will stand high in 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 121 

the constellations. Not that there will be no 
murmurs of discontent; the democratic tend- 
encies of the age will still have to be reckoned 
with, for they cannot be stilled for long. 
There are numerous Germans who insist to-day 
that their country can never again take a less 
exalted attitude toward its problems than that 
which it has assumed toward the crisis that now 
confronts it. What they call the ennobling of 
the nation by its readiness to sacrifice all, will, 
they declare, never be wholly lost; it will be 
impossible, they aver, for Germans ever to 
think parochially again. The Kaiser, too, was 
absolutely sincere when, in the spell of that 
momentous hour, he shook hands with the 
Social-Democratic leaders and said that party 
considerations would never again weigh with 
him. But he and they have spoken in an hour 
of spiritual intoxication. When they awake it 
will be to a realization that with the advent of 
a successful or an unsuccessful peace will come 
a rebirth of the old schisms and issues; that the 
Social-Democrats will appear as black as ever 
to the lords of privilege, and vice versa. If 
Germany escapes a period of gross corruption, 



122 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

of rank materialism, of lowered vitality, of gen- 
uine decadence, such as followed hard upon the 
heels of our idealistic war for the preservation 
of the American Union, she cannot avoid a 
coarsening of the nation's entire jQbre, for that 
is inevitable when a country goes through such 
physical horrors and suffering. When the sa- 
credness of human life, upon which foundation 
every state is founded in time of peace, is so 
utterly disregarded, so basely violated, there 
can be no return to the older ideal save at a 
high price. 

Beyond question, if the Kaiser triumphs it 
means a setback to every liberal democratic 
movement. War inevitably retards reforms 
wherever it is fought; the economic waste 
presses so heavily that a nation's shaken ener- 
gies are usually absorbed for years in making 
good the losses. Then we may count upon 
declarations by autocracy and aristocracy that 
their militaristic policies triumphed, that the 
mailed fist on sea and land alone saved the 
country from completest disaster. Again, there 
is nothing in the Kaiser's record to lead any one 
to hope that if he wins he will seek to reward 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 123 

the nation for its courage, steadfastness, and 
sacrifices by turning toward liberalism. But if 
he loses there will be a different story; only the 
defeat of the empire will afford hope that there 
will be rapid progress toward democratization, 
toward a responsible ministry, toward equality at 
the ballot-box in Prussia, toward elective rulers, 
toward the overthrow of the false gods of mili- 
tarism and imperialism. Disaster will mean 
the real test of the Kaiser's greatness as it meant 
a supreme test of the spiritual qualities of both 
the Napoleons, to which neither of them reacted. 
For human nature is so constituted that the 
public will begin to question and to find fault 
with its ruler if matters should go wrong. Then 
we should definitely learn if there are really 
great moral qualities and true spiritual leader- 
ship in the Kaiser; whether there is hidden in 
him any of that unshakable faith in the com- 
mon people which exalted Lincoln in the hour of 
darkness. Surely without Lincoln's sympathy 
for and understanding of the masses he could 
never have led them through years of defeat 
and discouragement to final triumph. Can a 
ruler who is as far removed from the great 



124 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

majority of his subjects as the Kaiser do as 
well? Time will perhaps tell. Will he shrink 
in defeat like the American who has most re- 
sembled him? Whether he does or does not, 
we shall be witnessing in the next few years, 
because of the war, still another phase of the 
fascinating mental and spiritual development 
of this extraordinary man, who in his own per- 
son has done more than any other ruler to re- 
vive the fading glories of royalty. When one 
looks at the other kings, him at Petrograd, at 
London, at Belgrade, at Vienna, and rates their 
mental caHbre, ponders on what they stand for, 
and sums up the good and the evil of their 
reigns, one cannot but feel that this Kaiser 
shines by contrast, for all his faults, for all his 
imperfect development which the war may do 
much to round out. 

He bulks still larger if we but regard the size 
of the men with whom he is surrounded. Com- 
pare Von Bethmann-HoUweg and Bismarck one 
cannot; the 1914 Von Moltke appears to re- 
semble the 1870 Von Moltke only in name. 
The more one considers the court at Berlin, 
the greater does the Kaiser's stature appear. 



THE KAISER AND THE WAR 125 

If his grandfather's simple, far from brilliant 
mentality drew men of great power to his side 
to be the real governors of Germany and the 
true arbiters of her fate, his grandson's dominant 
personality has attracted to him, particularly of 
late, no men of powers to match his own. He 
remains, when all is said and done, a vigorous, 
keen, stimulating, vital person, vibrating with 
power, at this hour confronted with a problem 
the solution of which is big with his own fate, 
that of his throne, and of his subjects. 



VI 

IMPERIALISM AND THE GERMAN 
PARTIES 

NATURALLY there are deeper causes 
than the Kaiser's ability and popu- 
larity, or the nation's amazing pros- 
perity, to account for Germany's readiness to 
live on under a government which is neither 
truly representative nor democratic. If David 
Starr Jordan goes to extremes when he says 
that her political ideals "hark back to the six- 
teenth century" and that "a great nation which 
its own people do not control is a nation without 
a government," it is nonetheless true that the 
German tendency to-day is away from govern- 
ment by numbers, and that one looks in vain 
between the Conservatives and Socialists for a 
really effective radical group with Hberal ideals. 
The failure of the National Liberals to stand as 
a great reform party has been chiefly respon- 
sible for the accession to the Social-Democratic 

126 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 127 

ranks of those who vote its ticket without being 
converts to its doctrines. There was a time 
some years ago when it appeared as if men Hke 
Ludwig Bamberger, Eugen Richter, Heinrich 
Rickert, Georg von Siemens, and Theodor 
Earth were to be the leaders of a truly Liberal 
party. They were statesmen who talked a lan- 
guage which liberal Americans, seeking to free 
their countrymen from the shackles of privilege, 
could understand as well as the English disciples 
of the Manchester school. Indeed, their polit- 
ical ideals were largely those of Cobden, Bright, 
and Gladstone. 

It could never have been said of Germany, 
had they become powerful factors in its parlia- 
mentary life, as it is being alleged to-day, that 
there exists an "irreconcilable antagonism of 
the two conceptions of hfe" — the German and 
the American. Herr Harden would have been 
far less hkely to write of the inability of the two 
nations to think ahke. This radical group was 
also profoundly influenced by American ideals 
with which Barth found himself in deepest 
sympathy because of a knowledge and appre- 
ciation of American institutions second only 



128 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

to that of James Bryce. These radicals stood 
in varying degrees for friendly international 
relations and labored for peace; they opposed 
Agrarian aggressions as they did the severe 
Bismarckian laws against the Socialists. They 
were earnest free-traders, opposing all protect- 
ive tariffs, as they did all duties on foodstuffs. 
While believing in fair and liberal treatment 
for the Social-Democrats, they vigorously op- 
posed their views, just as Barth led in denoun- 
cing the efforts to conquer the unconquerable 
Danes and Poles whom fate has placed under 
the Prussian eagle. There was nothing imperial- 
istic about them and it is difficult to think that 
if they had lived until the present crisis they 
would not have been desperately unhappy over 
Germany's plight to-day and her drift away 
from the pacific, democratic ideals for which | 

they contended. For example, as Von Billow 
admits, Eugen Richter very nearly defeated 
the army legislation asked by Count von 
Caprivi, whose demand for seventy batteries 
and 18,000 men seems modest indeed in the 
light of subsequent developments. Altogether 
they were a group so able as to exercise an in- 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 129 

fluence far out of proportion to their numbers; 
yet their followers have been ground between 
the misnamed National Liberals and the Con- 
servatives on the one hand, and the Social- 
Democrats on the other. In Bismarck's time 
all his great power was thrown against the 
Radicals, often to their personal financial loss. 
Individually he counted them among his most 
dangerous opponents. As for the National 
Liberals, they years ago threw away their chance 
to become a really strong reform party. In 
many respects they are but a shade less con- 
servative than the Conservatives. Independent 
radical spirits they attract not at all. In 1912 
at the Reichstag elections the Liberals and 
Radicals cast 3,227,846 votes as against 7,401,- 
825 cast for all the other parties. If they could 
but pull together and unite on a truly liberal 
and progressive platform, they could obviously 
exercise an enormous influence on German po- 
litical life. 

As the years went by, the enlightened radi- 
cal leaders disappeared one by one, and the 
development of the paradoxical modern Ger- 
many continued. Thanks to mihtarism on the 



130 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

one hand, with its constant teaching of com- 
plete submission to the authority of the state, 
and to the mistaken Social-Democratic policies 
and teachings on the other, the Agrarian, 
Clerical, and capitalistic forces before whom 
the government bends the knee have had 
things their own way. The Socialists have 
really aided the Kaiser from one point of view, 
for their theory that the state should do and be 
all has helped him to strengthen and increase 
his tremendously centralized and militaristic 
authority over his people. Dr. Michael Sadler, 
the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds, 
is one of the comparatively few foreign observers 
to perceive that for Germany this has meant a 
deadening of independent moral judgments and 
shrewd political observation by "an excessive 
use of state authority and by too persistent an 
appeal to national self-interest." Intense cen- 
tralization of power has defeated the advocates 
of a decentralized authority. "Militarism gave 
Germany discipline. Industrialism, helped by 
discipline, gave her wealth. The doctrine of 
the state secured general obedience and a cer- 
tain form of self-sacrifice. And by this combina- 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 131 

tion of good and evil modern Germany grew 
very rich and very strong." 

Prince von Biilow has said of his great prede- 
cessor, Bismarck, that "his rule can only serve 
as a precedent for a strong, determined, and 
even ruthless government." But Bismarck was 
a cynical intriguer as well as a man of blood and 
iron. If there was anything he would refrain 
from doing — falsifying documents, purchasing 
politicians, and corrupting the press — it would 
be hard to name it. Being without principle 
or scruple, he was naturally one of those poli- 
ticians who think it the height of statesmanship 
to steal from the other man's theories whenever 
one's rival seems to be striking a popular chord. 
With his nature, his firm belief in the neces- 
sity of an autocratic state intrusting complete 
power to the Kaiser he had created, a liberal 
policy such as that of Richter was out of the 
question. He turned his attention to the So- 
cialists, to beat them at their own game, and 
laid the foundations for that monarchical so- 
cialism which has often won praise abroad be- 
cause of its apparent devotion to the general 
welfare. The state administration of railroads. 



132 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

telegraphs, telephones, and of many mines and 
forests, its speculation in lands, its care of the 
aged, disabled, and unemployed, the former 
through compulsion of the employers, were 
nearly all the outgrowth of Bismarck's deter- 
mination to filch the clothes of his opponents 
and to use what he considered was available 
in Socialism to fortify the state against the com- 
plete demands of the Socialists. Friendly en- 
couragement of the Kartels, the German equiva- 
lent for our trusts, was but a natural step for so 
materialistic a state as Bismarck left. 

Yet, as so often happens, these particular com- 
promises have not only not resulted in the de- 
sired checking of the Social-Democratic party, 
but have actually witnessed its growth from 
124,700 votes in 1871 to 4,250,329 in 1912. In 
the five years from 1907 to 1912 it grew at the 
rate of 200,000 a year. It is as interesting to 
guess what Bismarck would have said to this 
as it is impossible to refrain from the thought 
that the government may find a certain com- 
pensation for the existing war in its diversion 
of public thought from internal to external 
affairs. Certainly, with the terrible human 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 133 

losses now going on, and the war-time rallying 
to the support of the Kaiser, it is perfectly safe 
to say that there will not be 200,000 Sociahst 
accessions in 1915. Prince von Bulow, who is 
a much more authoritative and skilful exponent 
of the modern imperialistic Germany than the 
Bernhardis and Treitschkes, will surely be of 
this view, for he has laid down the rule that a 
vigorous national pohcy is the very best defense 
against the Social-Democratic movement — "a 
pohcy which brings the best powers of the na- 
tion into play; which supports and strengthens 
the middle classes, already numerous and ever 
increasing in number, the vast majority of 
whom steadily uphold the monarchy and the 
state. . . . The idea of the nation as such 
must again and again be emphasized by dealing 
with national problems, so that this idea may 
continue to move, to unite and to separate 
parties. . . . The danger must be faced and 
met with a great and comprehensive national 
policy. ..." What could please him better 
than a foreign conflict if it can but be success- 
fully carried on ? 

Thus the Social-Democrats, the only great, 



134 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

vital, radical force in German politics, are likely 
to suffer doubly from the war: first, through 
the temporary ending of all agitation and the 
changed public attitude toward domestic af- 
fairs; and secondly, because of their own in- 
consistent policy toward the war. It is true 
that when the party in its annual conclaves 
has voted on the question of a general strike 
in case of war, the proposal has been rejected. 
Nevertheless, it was felt that, if the menace 
of war came, they would exert a tremendous 
pacific influence at home and abroad. This 
conflict came too suddenly for that, but it was 
still believed that Socialists on both sides would 
refuse to take part in the fighting, or at least 
record their abhorrence by voting against it. 
But the deadly poison of compromise had en- 
tered the veins of the German brothers of the 
Socialist faith when they voted to increase and 
support the army, precisely as the same spirit 
of compromise with those who believe in a 
large army and navy has palsied the effective- 
ness of our American peace societies. Had 
even a few of the German followers of Marx 
possessed sufficient courage and conviction to 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 135 

go to jail for their pacific beliefs, or to face a 
firing squad, if need be, their cause would have 
been advanced the world over. Now it is suf- 
fering proportionately everywhere; in all coun- 
tries the Socialists are being tainted with in- 
sincerity, with being without the courage of 
their convictions. In Germany, Liebknecht 
alone has dared to refuse to vote for a war 
credit, and for this he may be punished ere 
these words appear in type; for, as Von Billow 
has declared, the Social-Democrats are as thor- 
oughly disciplined as any other body in the 
Kaiser's empire — to which fact he attributes 
their formidableness. It is obvious, surely, 
that the Social-Democrats will have gained 
nothing and have lost much by the war, which 
they can hardly criticise successfully after hav- 
ing voted to support it and after having taken 
part in it. It must be a wide-spread cause of 
regret that what seemed like one of the most 
hopeful forces for peace is now bound and de- 
livered. 

The trouble was that there was nobody 
among the German Socialists to speak out 
hke Romain RoUand in France and to point 



136 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

out to them the error of their present position: 
that by holding aloof from their country's bat- 
tles they will merely bring upon themselves 
the whip of the Russian autocracy and that 
social organization of England which, in foreign 
eyes, grinds down her poor. With rare elo- 
quence Rolland wrote: 

"You Socialists on both sides claim to be de- 
fending liberty against tyranny — French lib- 
erty against the Kaiser, German liberty against 
the Czar. Would you defend one despotism 
against another? Unite and make war on both. 
There was no reason for war between the West- 
ern nations; French, English, and German, we 
are all brothers and do not hate one another. 
The war-preaching press is envenomed by a 
minority, a minority vitally interested in main- 
taining these hatreds, but our peoples, I know, 
ask for peace and liberty and that alone. . . . 
Who has brought these plagues upon them, 
brought them to the desperate alternative of 
overwhelming their adversary or dying ? None 
other than their governments, on whom, in my 
opinion, the guilt rests; the three rapacious 
eagles, the three empires, the tortuous policy 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 137 

of the house of Austria, the ravenous greed of 
Russia, the brutahty of Prussia. The worst 
enemy of each nation is not without but within 
its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight 
against it." 

Had German Socialism but spoken with as 
clear a note, how vastly strengthened would be 
its position to-day ! 

If this blunder cannot now be undone, it is 
interesting to note that Dr. Albert Sudekum, 
the Social-Democratic leader and the member of 
the Reichstag who is perhaps best informed as 
to conditions in the United States, in a recent 
lecture in BerHn on "The War and the Ger- 
man Laboring Man," served notice on the 
prominent government officials in his audience 
that his party would ask, when peace is re- 
stored, a good many rewards for their patriotism 
as attested by their military services and sac- 
rifices. He called for such a "mobilization" 
after the war, in matters of law and education, 
together with a reform of the Constitution, as 
will give the masses a far larger share in their 
government and their administration. 

Should this come about, it ought to be at the 



138 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

expense of the Clericals and Conservatives (the 
upper millstone for the Radicals), whose po- 
sition will surely be strengthened if the Kaiser 
wins. It is true that when it comes to questions 
of national defense there are no Catholics and 
no Protestants. Religious prejudices as affect- 
ing these two churches are not tolerated in the 
army, however powerful racial dishkes may be. 
There are no Protestant or Catholic regiments 
as such. But in the country as a whole the 
influence of Rome presses severely in more 
quarters than one, and the Clerical party is a 
religious party, however it may deny the fact. 
Bavaria, a Clerical kingdom, lags in some re- 
spects well behind the other German states. 
In brief, the Centre is the party of reaction or 
of standing still. In the nation its programme 
is for rehgious teaching in the schools, for a 
compulsory religious marriage, for protective 
tariffs, and for the strongly centralized state. 
It has for years formed a sohd block of approxi- 
mately one hundred votes in the Reichstag, 
usually cast on the side of the government, but 
at times in opposition, in order to obtain party 
advantage or by reason of a political bargain. 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 139 

In one such case, in 1906, when the Reichstag 
refused to vote the emergency estimates for 
the army then fighting in Southwest Africa, the 
Centre actually struck hands for the moment 
with their sworn enemies the Social-Democrats. 
Von Billow dissolved the Reichstag on the 
ground that a refusal to vote the men and sup- 
plies the Kaiser asked was an intolerable inva- 
sion of his constitutional rights as supreme war- 
lord. The Centre gained three votes in the 
ensuing election, the Social-Democrats meeting 
with a veritable, but totally unexpected, dis- 
aster. 

While Von Bulow was ever ready to accept 
the historic support of the throne by the Cler- 
icals when it was to be had, he now feels that 
there are "many weighty reasons why a rehg- 
ious party should not wield such extraordinary 
and decisive influence in polities as was the 
case for many years in this country. The 
Centre is and will remain a party held together 
by religious views, however subtly opinion in 
Cologne and Berlin may argue about the idea 
of a religious party." One of these weighty 
reasons is probably a recognition of the fact that 



140 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

logically a church like the Roman Cathohc must 
be more concerned with international poUty than 
national. The trend of the church is in the op- 
posite direction from the intense national idea 
toward which the Germany of to-day has been 
steered. Imperiahstic materiahsts of the Von 
Bulow-Treitschke type cannot, moreover, view 
with satisfaction the control in Rome, a foreign 
city, of a great German church which numbers 
one-third of the citizens of the nation. Then 
there are the historic encounters between the 
Centre and the federal government in BerHn 
which show pretty clearly that there is always 
the possibiHty of a conflict between them, that 
is, between the wishes of the papacy at Rome 
and the controlling powers in Berlin. 

Hence the German Imperialists have felt that, 
however much the Centre might lean toward 
conservatism and the support of the throne, it 
would sooner or later be a serious stumbling- 
block in their way. Von Biilow was the more 
ready, therefore, in 1907 to turn to Liberals and 
Radicals for his majority. The latter fell 
readily into his nationaHstic trap and were 
soon compromising themselves from the stand- 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 141 

point of consistency and principle by voting for 
the great armaments, quite forgetting how bril- 
liantly Rickert had opposed them a few years 
before. In consequence Von Biilow was able to 
point triumphantly to the spectacle of all the 
middle-class parties hned up for militarism and 
for that world-imperiaHsm which, as now ap- 
pears, was the logical outcome of the national- 
istic propaganda. At the beginning of the fate- 
ful year 1914 Von Bulow could even write in 
his own justification: *'The national questions of 
the empire have ceased to be a subject of anx- 
iety in home poHtics." But, confidently as he 
and others may hope to find the power of the 
church of Rome in Germany weakened by the 
tremendous outburst of national feeHng due to 
the war, it is by no means certain that they 
will find their hopes realized. The Centre, 
which could gain seats in the bitter campaign 
of 1906, when it was taunted with an unpa- 
triotic failure to support a German army under 
fire — freely portrayed as tantamount to trea- 
son — is the party least Hkely to be affected by 
the war, however desirable might be a decrease 
of its power. It appears to be practically un- 



142 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

shakable in its intrenched position by any 
upheaval whether due to domestic or foreign 
causes — at least unless its South German 
strongholds are affected by some far-reaching 
wave of liberalism and reform. If the reasons 
given above for the natural aloofness of the 
Centre from the nationalistic policy are sound, 
future chancellors will still have to reckon with 
its lukewarmness, as did Von Bulow. 

As for the Conservatives and the favored 
minority of privilege-holders they represent, 
what more natural than for these overlords to 
turn from imperialistic exploitation and domi- 
nation at home to imperialistic schemes abroad ? 
They, too, have recognized in their appeal 
to national pride, ambition, and cupidity, an 
excellent means of combating the advocates 
of social revolution. They have asserted that 
colonies were necessary to protect their over- 
seas trade and to provide for their surplus pop- 
ulation. But emigration dropped from 220,902 
in 1881 to the insignificant figure of 19,883 in 
1908. Those who maintain, therefore, that 
Germany must have territory to which to over- 
flow can justify themselves only by reference 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 143 

to a distant future. If the German steamship 
lines had had to depend upon German emi- 
grants for support, they must long since have 
failed; even to South America — Brazil and 
the Argentine — about which our American 
jingoes have shown such hypocritical concern, 
lest there be a violation of the Monroe Doc- 
trine, the German emigration is, of late, abso- 
lutely nil. There has been too great prosperity 
at home and too rapid industrial expansion. 
Then, the German is not a successful colonist; 
he is as overbearing and unjust in governing the 
natives that come under his sway as our South- 
erners are in their treatment of the negro masses 
upon whose manual labor their prosperity is 
founded. Ruthless Prussian methods are ap- 
plied abroad as if they were the only standards 
of government; as if there were no possibility 
that forms and methods of administration might 
have to be changed in different climates with 
different human beings. As a result there have 
been bloody rebellions in the largest colonies. 
It is a kind of poetic justice, therefore, which 
sends native troops against the Germans. The 
spirits of the slaughtered and starved Herreros 



144 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

may perhaps be rejoicing at the sight in about 
the same measure as the Germans are horrified 
that their Kultur is being assailed by what they 
are pleased to call "mongrel races." 

Still another fact shows the falsity of the 
German imperialist contention as to the neces- 
sity of colonies. Each year several hundred 
thousand Italian, Russian, Polish, and Hunga- 
rian workmen cross into Germany to harvest 
the crops. They in part, therefore, take the 
place of the 860,000 Germans who are drawn 
off from industrial employments because of the 
compulsory military service. At almost all 
times it is possible to see in South Germany 
Italians working on large public enterprises pre- 
cisely as they are doing the heavy work in the 
eastern States of America. In other words, the 
expansion of German industry which is so ap- 
parent by contrast the minute one crosses the 
Alsacian border, when bound from France east- 
ward, has far outrun the natural expansion of 
the population, and this is true despite the over- 
crowding and the poverty of the masses in the 
cities. But, if it were not true, it is still a fact 
that the Germans are untempted by the oppor- 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 145 

tunities in their colonies, as Doctor Dernburg, 
the best colonial minister they have had, well 
knows. In some of the smaller colonies the 
total German population is practically the 
official one. Never was there so clear a case 
of acquisition for acquisition's sake as this of 
the German colonies. Until the early eighties 
Germany lived in complete happiness without 
thought of one. Then the idea came to Bis- 
marck that Germany must be in the fashion, 
and so the grabbing of other people's lands 
began, in slavish imitation of France and Eng- 
land. As one who was in Berlin when the first 
"German Africans" arrived there, the writer 
well recalls what elaborate official efforts were 
made to rouse the public to enthusiasm over this 
first plunge into an oversea venture, which was 
part of Bismarck's deliberate propaganda to 
arouse national pride and solidarity among the 
German states then unified but a dozen years. 

As for the argument that Germany must have 
colonies as coaling stations for her war-ships 
and refuges for her merchantmen in the event 
of hostilities, the war has shown that for her 
the only safe harbors abroad are neutral ones. 



146 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Her navy, which, it was insisted, was necessary 
to protect her commerce, has failed to do so, 
and despite the daring and dash of the Karls- 
ruhe , the Emden, and a few others, the injury 
inflicted by her commerce-destroyers is a mere 
trifle when compared with the British loss in 
exports and imports in the first five months of 
the struggle due solely to the dislocation of 
trade by the war. This commerce-protecting 
argument has done good service in Germany for 
the imperialists, but if there had been no great 
merchant fleet to warrant it, another reason 
for this naval expansion would have been found, 
precisely as our American imperialists have 
found other excuses for our unduly large "de- 
fensive" navy. The mischief done to Germany 
by the upbuilding of its fleet will one day, we 
trust, be set forth by some sound German his- 
torian, after the bitterness of the present con- 
flict has passed away. He will show how its 
upbuilding increased the size of the French, 
British, and United States fleets; how it gave 
chauvinists everywhere the opportunity to rouse 
suspicion and passion against Germany, and 
how its existence helped to draw Great Britain 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 147 

into the catastrophe of 1914. He will recall 
to his readers the fact that Germany's coasts 
needed no fleet to protect them in 1870. 

Judging by the masterly inactivity of the 
French and Russian fleets thus far, those coasts 
would have been safe enough under the protec- 
tion of their guns and mines had France and 
Russia been Germany's only enemies. Up to 
the present time there has been nothing in the 
progress of the naval war to prove that Ger- 
many has gained anything of real moment by 
her fleet. The war will be decided on land, 
and thus far the Kaiser's navy has weakened 
its opponents scarcely at all; it has simply fed 
German pride by proving that Germany's offi- 
cers and men are no less excellent seamen, and 
perhaps even more daring, than England's; that 
they can fight and die with supreme courage and 
complete readiness to sacrifice all, even when 
the odds are overwhelming. The development 
of the German fleet has, indeed, had a tragic 
effect upon the fortunes of the nation, if only 
because of the uneasiness and antagonism it has 
created in Great Britain, Germany's natural 
ally. 



148 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

If it be asserted that this is England's fault, 
that the danger to her swollen navalism was 
really what aroused her to strike, and that she 
has no natural right to a monopoly of sea-power, 
our answer is that it is difficult to see how Ger- 
many has benefited in any w^ay by her fleet to 
offset the anxieties it created, justly or unjustly, 
not only in England, but in France and the 
United States. The writer holds no brief what- 
ever for the British navy, but no one can point 
to any injury done to Germany's sea trade since 
the foundation of the empire by reason of the 
preponderance of British war-ships. In the face 
of it the German merchant fleet has grown year 
by year with amazing celerity, because of the 
enterprise and far-sightedness of her merchants, 
the skill of her ship-builders, the character and 
abihty of her seamen. No subsidies have been 
needed, and no colonies either, for this wonderful 
expansion, and no selfish appeals to national 
cupidity or national pride. Her battle fleet 
has helped not at all, for her conquest of the 
sea has in fact been due to the same thrift, 
scientific management, and industry that ac- 
count for her success ashore. The war fleet, it 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 149 

must be repeated, has burdened Germany be- 
cause of the fears and prejudices it caused; 
but this is, of course, the very contrary of the 
teachings of the nationahsts and imperiaUsts. 

Unfortunately for Germany, as has been 
pointed out, her diplomacy has often marred her 
efforts to essay the role of a world-power. Her 
diplomatic corps has been too rigid and too nar- 
row, too exclusively aristocratic, too little rep- 
resentative of the best in the nation, and too 
prone to adopt the bureaucratic tone. It still 
appears to be actuated by the old idea that 
the diplomat is the personal representative and 
agent of the monarch and of nobody else. In- 
telligent Germans frankly envy the French for- 
eign service, in which a man of talents may 
rise to the highest posts without having to seek 
the favor of an exclusive, autocratic court. 
They have seen much good in our American 
diplomatic system, or, better, lack of system. 
For if it sometimes leads to our being misrep- 
resented abroad by men lacking in experience, 
knowledge, good manners, and refinement, it 
at least brings men of varying types to the 
front — business men, journaUsts, lawyers, pol- 



150 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

iticians, and not mere bureaucrats of a pecul- 
iarly narrow tradition. True, these professional 
diplomats are supposed to be broadened by 
residence in all quarters of the globe; yet, as a 
writer in the Deutsche Rundschau has recently 
pointed out, the German bureaucracy, although 
"the most reliable and best in the world, must 
fail in the foreign service, because the training 
is rigid, inflexible, and precisely the same as for 
administrative duties at home." Others may 
not agree with him that German diplomacy has 
been "too correct" and too much controlled by 
a narrow judicial point of view. But his asser- 
tion that it is small-calibred and that it smacks 
too much of the petty bureaucratic, i. e., is too 
'' assessorenhafty" is not likely to be gainsaid 
by those who know. As a result, he says, the 
German meets everywhere he goes with "a 
failure to understand him or a disUke tinged 
with hatred." This writer is frank to say that 
this state of affairs cannot be explained away 
by asserting that German success is Germany's 
only crime; the responsibiHty, he insists, lies 
not all with the other nations. 
The truth surely is that Germany's inner 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 151 

social and political development has not kept 
pace with the expansion of her foreign trade 
and her international interests, with the result, 
as we have seen, that those international rela- 
tions have been bunglingly handled for do- 
mestic political purposes or for a world-policy 
injurious to the nation. This cannot be empha- 
sized too strongly, and when to it be added that 
the men who are trusted to interpret Germany's 
national aspirations abroad are not representa- 
tive of the aspirations of the bulk of the people, 
or even of her commercial interests, the reasons 
for dissatisfaction with her foreign service are 
plain. The press repeatedly sins when it comes 
to dealing with foreign affairs; at least, it has 
a rare faculty for supporting the wrong side. 
Thus, in the Spanish-American War, in uphold- 
ing Spain it made absolutely no allowance for 
the altruistic and unselfish motives which ac- 
tuated the bulk of the American people; it 
failed to distinguish that, however badly a sec- 
tion of our press, politicians, and public might 
behave, there was at bottom no ulterior purpose. 
Recollections of German tactlessness at Ma- 
nila and elsewhere rankle in this country to 



152 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Germany's detriment to-day. In the settle- 
ment of the Chinese war she ahenated Japan 
and angered England, with the resultant Anglo- 
Japanese alliance now so fateful to her. When 
England made advances, Germany rebuffed her, 
because at that particular moment she cared 
more for her friendship with Russia, the net 
result being that Russia, France, and England 
became allies. All of which recalls the saying 
of Friedrich Wilhelm IV that "the army has in 
every case had to make good the blunders of 
our diplomacy"; that it may succeed in doing 
so now must surely be the fervent wish of many 
thousands of Germans to-day. 

Even when, as in Moroccan affairs, Germany 
was tactically correct, her diplomats have not 
known how to utilize their situation to the full- 
est advantage, or how to present their case so 
as to make the best possible impression on the 
rest of the world. It is impossible to-day to 
foresee any better relations for her with the 
other members of the family of nations until 
responsible parliamentary government is estab- 
lished with control over foreign affairs and with 
the powers of the Kaiser curtailed. 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 153 

The same thing is true of the Russian au- 
tocracy to-day. England, for instance, is very 
happy to have Russia help her, but trust her 
she does not. It all comes back to the fact 
that in our present political development an 
unchecked monarchy is a far greater danger 
to the peace of the world than is a democracy. 
How soon is this going to be realized by the 
German masses? How soon will they see that 
the best way to master the seas and supply the 
needs of the outside world is the pacific way, 
the way of free and friendly trade without the 
threat of army and navy ? How soon will they 
realize the harm that this threat has worked in 
the past; that their altogether admirable con- 
quest of foreign marts has been used as a blind 
by those who would cure internal ills not by 
genuine reforms, but by playing one party off 
against another and confusing all by chauvin- 
istic appeals,^ Upon the speed with which 
these questions are answered would seem to 
depend the progress of internal reform in Ger- 
many, for which her well-wishers look so ea- 
gerly. 

By its very nature war checks reasoning; yet 



154 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the hour will come when Germany's political 
leaders, her men and women of conscience, will 
sit down with one another to judge the past 
and to count the costs of the war. They will 
find their country bereaved and in mourning for 
an incredible number of needlessly wasted souls, 
with scarcely a family unseared by some bitter, 
bitter loss. By the side of this impoverish- 
ment, materialistic things pale, but how great 
will be the money debt to face them, to coun- 
teract and offset years and years of arduous, 
penurious labor, of thrift, of self-denial ! The 
Hves of all who survive will be profoundly af- 
fected and altered. Cherished ambitions will 
have come to naught; for thousands of parents 
who will have sacrificed not one but two and 
three sons the skies will be clouded forever. 
No sunlight will again penetrate the darkened 
chambers of their hearts. Men and women by 
tens of thousands will have passed overnight 
from riches and competence to poverty. The 
misery of the poor will handicap them more than 
ever, particularly if, in addition to the debt of 
the war, they must again take up the burden 
of supporting 860,000 men in unproductive labor 



IMPERIALISM AND PARTIES 155 

to prepare for another such massacre of inno- 
cents — for such it is. All this at the bidding 
of an uncontrolled imperialism ! 

Will not the masses, if they but reason about 
it, be tempted to pray that their enemies may 
have the power to punish them by sinking their 
fleet, by levelling their forts, by forbidding 
them to arm again ? Will they not, failing that, 
take it upon themselves to arrange their affairs 
and recast their institutions that the like of 
this most diabolical of catastrophes shall never 
occur again? Will they not insist upon their 
reckoning with the "national idea," recogniz- 
ing it as an autocratic device to confuse issues 
and parties? Will there not be raised up now 
a Gambetta; some real champion of the people, 
unhampered by the fallacies of Socialism, to lead 
with a constructive, but radical, programme? 
For him Germany has long been waiting, per- 
haps even now in vain. But there is a wonder- 
ful need for such a one to point the true way 
to national greatness; to overcome the falla- 
cies of professors and princes; to show what is 
the true spiritual way to conquer the world, to 
call up once more the spirit of the old, beloved 



156 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Germany, self-contained, lovable, devoted to 
liberal thought as to freedom from cant and 
dogma, a menace to nobody, revered every- 
where for her sciences, her knowledge, and the 
wisdom of her teachings. 

Perhaps only one thing is certain: the polit- 
ical Germany of yesterday has gone forever. 
It is beyond recall, whatever the check or the 
gain to the things of the spirit, or whither the 
current of democracy shall flow which now stirs 
so sluggishly the political deeps of what is the 
Kaiser's empire, but must some day be his 
people's. 



VII 

THE UNITED STATES AND THE 
PEACE TREATY 

^T this writing many Americans are chaf- 
/■\ ing at President Wilson's policy of neu- 
trality. They would have the United 
States officially voice its protest against the 
violation of Belgium. Was it not a signatory 
with Germany to that convention of the Second 
Hague Conference which forbade belligerents 
to move troops across the territory of a neutral 
power? Shall the United States remain silent 
while Germany makes of these solemn Hague 
treaties mere scraps of paper? Ought this 
country not to hasten the end of the war by 
letting Germany feel the full weight of our 
government's indignation at this breach of 
faith? Some, like ex-President Eliot, urge that 
we participate in the war in order that blood- 
shed cease at an early date and that the victory 

157 



158 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

be so decisive as to make out of the question a 
Waterloo a few years hence. 

Against this President Wilson has wisely set 
himself like flint. It is of the utmost impor- 
tance to all the combatants that the greatest 
of the remaining neutral nations should keep its 
poise and be free from the bias inevitable if it 
should take sides by diplomatic action or by 
active participation in the war. Both sides 
have appealed to the head of this country to 
judge the alleged illegal war-acts of their ene- 
mies — a striking proof that they have felt the 
need of an unprejudiced international tribunal 
before which to plead. Both sides have thus 
admitted the dominating moral position of the 
United States. There appears to be general 
agreement that it will be President Wilson's 
task to initiate the peace proceedings when 
there has been butchery enough. Returning 
travellers report that President Wilson's repu- 
tation abroad has grown immeasurably since 
the war began. British newspapers have dwelt 
with satisfaction on that passage in his annual 
message to Congress in which he so eloquently 
says that "We are the champions of peace and 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 159 

of concord. And we should be very jealous of 
this distinction which we have sought to earn. 
Just now we should be particularly jealous of 
it because it is our dearest present hope that 
this character and reputation may, presently, in 
God's providence, bring us an opportunity such 
as has seldom been vouchsafed any nation, the 
opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in 
the world and reconciliation and healing settle- 
ment of many a matter that has cooled and in- 
terrupted the friendship of nations," If there 
has been some serious irritation by reason of 
Mr. Wilson's firm and just protest against the 
British policy in regard to neutral vessels, there 
Js every prospect that the friendly tone of the 
American communication and of the British an- 
swer will permit a speedy and satisfactory set- 
tlement of the entire matter without any grave 
disturbance of the amicable relations previously 
existing. 

Aside from this incident, there is satisfaction 
abroad with the attitude taken by our govern- 
ment up to this time — even in Germany; if 
there are some English newspapers which would 
have us pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and 



160 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

some German which would have us legislate to 
forbid the sale of arms and military supplies to 
England, as we stopped the exports to Mexico, 
they all admit that there is no criticism to be 
made of the pohcy of the President or his of- 
ficial acts. There is not the slightest insinuation 
that we have failed in any respect in our duty 
as a neutral under the existing laws; Secretary 
Bryan's statement to Senator Stone must prove 
this to all who are unbiassed. This, together 
with the prevaiHng belief that there is in the 
White House a man of the exceptional stature 
needed for the wonderful opportunity looming 
up before him, makes it of the utmost impor- 
tance that Mr. Wilson should not abate a single 
jot from the pohcy of neutrality he has marked 
out for himself and the country. 

We are in all the better position to serve be- 
cause the President has passed no judgment 
upon the allegations of German atrocities in 
Belgium, and has so wisely declared that these 
are matters to be decided not in hot but in cold 
blood. Among our public, too, there is a grow- 
ing consciousness that few of these stories of 
atrocities can be supported, as our returning 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 161 

American war correspondents have testified. 
The counter-allegations of similar brutalities 
by French, Russians, Servians, Germans, and 
Austrians against each other ought to make 
Americans reahze how frightful are the cruelty 
and destruction inseparable from war, and how 
greatly a curious war-hysteria has distorted the 
vision and the statements of those who undergo 
the terror of modern carnage. When officers 
and men of unquestioned courage are actually 
being driven insane on both sides by the hor- 
rors they witness, it is not surprising that we 
have to deal with the wildest allegations, which, 
if true, would prove that human nature breaks 
down utterly with the first shots. The people 
of the United States will unsparingly blame 
those who are wantonly guilty when the facts 
are established; meanwhile, if the press is an 
index, they are more and more following the 
President's example and reserving judgment. 

Great, doubtless, would be the service ren- 
dered to the Allies if the United States should 
fling itself into the war. Far greater is the 
service which it can perform if it holds not 
only our historic but our moral position intact. 



162 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

"This," Mr. Wilson wrote, "is the time above 
all others when we should wish and resolve to 
keep our strength by seK-possession." For us 
to rush either into the war or into extensive 
preparations for war would be not merely to tie 
the President's hands, to deprive him of his 
position of vantage, but to rob the nation of its 
vast moral prestige, for it would be the very 
reverse of keeping our strength and self-pos- 
session. And the goal is not merely the extend- 
ing of our good offices and the offering of a navy- 
yard building for the plenipotentiaries to occupy, 
as Mr. Roosevelt was able to do for Russia and 
Japan. It is no distortion of the President's 
just quoted words to see in them a desire to use 
our great influence in the direction of such a 
disposition of the question of armaments as to 
make impossible a recurrence of this cataclysm 
with its horrible sum total of misery. That 
this country has suffered so gravely because of 
the war in its role of innocent bystander, and 
that it is, as the President says, honestly de- 
sirous of itself keeping out of the maelstrom of 
militarism, are other reasons that assure it a 
position of commanding importance provided 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 163 

that the President remains a friend to all parties 
until the end. For him to attempt to achieve 
his great aim with Congress voting a larger 
army and navy and many new battleships 
would be out of the question. "You ask us to 
disarm," would be the answer, "when you are 
arming as never before. What sinister motive 
dictates the suggestion?" Should the Presi- 
dent take sides, the moral leadership would fall 
to some one else, or, in the absence of any other 
powerful neutral executive, would be lacking 
altogether. 

How grave this would be is apparent if one 
considers that all hope of the world's return to 
sanity rests upon the coming peace conference. 
What shall it avail humanity if a hateful Prus- 
sian militarism be smashed only to leave in its 
place a more hateful and dangerous Russian 
mihtarism and an even more dominating British 
navalism? Where will be the gain if the Con- 
tinent remains armed precisely as before save 
that Germany's wings are clipped ? What hope 
of lasting peace will there be if the mihtarists 
are to continue to dominate in the counsels of 
state .^ How long can so unnatural an alliance 



164 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

as that of reactionary Russia and liberal Eng- 
land last if there is a return to the old system 
of checks and balances, of secret and open al- 
liances, with the power to make war in the 
hands of a few who have supreme authority 
over great military machines ? Everybody now 
agrees that this war must have come, sooner or 
later, because the militarism of Europe made it 
inevitable. How soon will another come if it is 
left practically intact ? 

It is the curse of the whole military business 
that, whether it be German, or French, or 
Russian, or American, it inevitably breeds a 
powerful military propaganda. Its advocates 
talk it, think it, prepare for it, urge it, glory 
in it, insist that blood-letting must come every 
now and then, and, in Europe, have trained 
whole peoples to their belief. The psycho- 
logical effect of all of this false teaching is ines- 
timable, and it is not to be measured by the 
numbers engaged in it; a few men of Lord 
Roberts's standing, assuming expert knowl- 
edge not possessed by any one else, may do 
incalculable harm. It is beyond all question 
that the Austrian mihtary party sought war 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 165 

with Servia not once, but three times, and 
finally brought it about, thanks to the arch- 
duke's assassination. Its members, and the 
rank and file of the army, were exultingly cer- 
tain that war was at hand in 1912. "Es lebe 
der Krieg!" was the toast, and bitter was their 
disappointment that their old Kaiser held them 
in check during the Balkan wars. It was not 
German militarism that was the extreme dan- 
ger point then but the Austrian, with the others 
not far behind, the Austrians solemnly prating 
that armies are the best insurance against war 
when they were doing their utmost to bring 
it on. They differ but in degrees. And is the 
world, when this war is over, to continue their 
policy, which at best spells economic ruin, with 
the United States perhaps following suit.? If 
so, the men who are being maimed and are 
dying by the hundred thousand in the prime of 
their manhood are suffering and perishing in 
vain. 

Again, what more glorious opportunity could 
there be than this offers for that moral lead- 
ership of the world which in some respects has 
always been America's ? Indubitably, we shall 



166 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

hear warnings that for Mr. Wilson to do any- 
thing beyond providing a meeting-place for 
peace plenipotentiaries may lead to dangerous 
entanglements; that it is our business to stand 
aloof and mind our own affairs lest we be drawn 
into some international agreement of the kind 
against which Washington in his far-seeing wis- 
dom warned us so earnestly and so wisely. 
But wisely to exercise our moral influence will 
mean nothing of the kind. Already we have 
been deeply affected by the war; we have been 
drawn into it spiritually by our sympathies, 
economically through our suffering and through 
the contributions of our granaries, our arms, 
and our powder factories; politically because 
of the appeals to us to act as judge of wrong- 
doing. Shall the most extraordinary chance to 
lead the world back to the natural, peaceful 
status of man be allowed to slip by with no 
effort on our part? It is unthinkable, if there 
is any imagination left in the White House; if 
there is any response there to an overwhelming 
moral appeal. We know there is. 

Here is a straightforward practical under- 
taking on behalf of peace to stir every man not 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 167 

war-mad. Never was there a better vantage- 
ground for attacking the whole vicious system, 
because some of the oldest militaristic shibbo- 
leths have been shown to be utterly baseless. 
That hoary old falsehood that armies make 
for peace is as exploded now as is the assertion 
that training in arms alone keeps a nation from 
rotting out, from becoming craven and flabby. 
Hereafter militarism is in the open, to be de- 
fended, if at all, on the grounds that nobody is 
to be trusted; that mankind has not advanced 
during the centuries; that there is no way for 
any nation to Hve save with rifle on hip; that 
there is nothing in morahty or national honor 
or Christianity. If militarism is to continue 
to exist, we must be frankly brutal, frankly 
cynical, and here in peaceful America we shall 
be urged by some fellow citizens to make the 
business of preparing to kill other peoples the 
supreme business of the nation. The world, in 
other words, is to defeat Prussian Bernhardiism, 
but is itself to be conquered by his doctrines 
— even the most peace-loving of democracies, 
safeguarded by two oceans; the democracy 
which came into being partly because of a 



168 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

profound hatred of a standing army of its own 
folk which menaced its freedom of poHtical 
growth. Are we calmly to assent to this teach- 
ing of cynics, or are we to seize the opportu- 
nity practically and seriously to contend with 
these forces which menace the happiness of the 
world ? 

Surely the President of the United States who 
failed to profit by the unique international po- 
sition which presents itself would be recreant 
to this trust and to our national traditions. It 
is not meant by this that the President should 
take an aggressive attitude and insist that 
American commissioners shall thrust their legs 
under the table of peace. Active participa- 
tion, if permitted, might easily be a fatal mis- 
take; direct action, unless the opportunity 
comes just in the right way, might prove more 
hurtful than helpful. But behind the Presi- 
dent stands the sound, generous, and united 
public opinion of the American people, and 
that can be focussed and expressed when the 
hour comes. How to make it tell is the Presi- 
dent's task; it cannot be impossible when the 
belligerents have already besought us to exert 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 169 

it. Failure, of course, may be the President's 
lot. The bitter hatreds being aroused may end 
the possibility of even his good offices; but 
emphatically this is a case where not failure 
but low aim will be the crime. The oppor- 
tunity is to serve not merely America and the 
belligerents, but all mankind. 

"For the finer spirits of Europe there are 
two dweUing-places," RoUand has written; "our 
earthly fatherland, and that other City of 
God. Of the one we are the guests, of the 
other the builders. To the one let us give our 
lives and our faithful hearts; but neither fam- 
ily, friend, nor fatherland, nor aught that we 
love, has power over the spirit, which is the 
light. It is our duty to rise above tempests, 
and thrust aside the clouds which threaten to 
obscure it; to build higher and stronger, dom- 
inating the injustice and hatred of nations, the 
walls of that city wherein the souls of the 
whole world may assemble." If this is Eu- 
rope's duty it is still more that of the United 
States, to whom has suddenly come the spiritual 
and moral leadership of the world. It is for 
us to build higher and stronger than any one 



170 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

else; not only to dominate injustice and hatred 
in other nations, but those in our own hearts. 
The people of this country would hail as an- 
other Lincoln a President who could translate 
into action their ardent desire to render this 
service in this spirit and to give expression to 
our own pacific aims; to extend that "final 
help" of which the London Times wrote. By 
the side of this, of what importance is a formal 
declaration that the United States views with 
regret the violation of Belgian neutraHty? All 
the world knows that it does; to record it 
officially would be to antagonize two great na- 
tions and to tie our hands for the "final help." 
But it is precisely for those two offending 
nations that the United States ought to step 
into the breach. The victors, if victors the Al- 
lies prove to be, must needs be checked, unless 
smouldering animosities like those left by the 
peace of 1871 and the annexation of Alsace- 
Lorraine are to rankle for another forty years, 
then to burst into flames again. Aheady in 
England they are beginning to see this. Men 
of hght and leading are protesting that Ger- 
many must not be degraded; that all talk of 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 171 

rending her limb from limb is as absurd as to 
speak of wiping her off the map. The "Union 
of Democratic Control" has been founded, one 
of the objects of which is to influence the terms 
of peace so that at least no province or terri- 
tory shall be torn from its present allegiance, 
except by the consent of the people, duly regis- 
tered by a fair vote. 

Prominent writers like Professor Sidney Webb 
are voicing humane sentiments at public meet- 
ings, such as: "HumiHation is the most expen- 
sive luxury in which any victor can indulge, 
because it does not pay." Mr. Webb declares 
that it would involve "an enormous loss to 
the world if the war should end with Europe 
armed to the teeth, or if the enemy were left 
in a state of furious hatred." Others are even 
questioning the wisdom of a great indemnity, 
and are asking if the moral effect is not more 
advantageous to the nation paying the in- 
demnity than to that receiving it — a question 
which inevitably recalls the French experience 
in paying the 1871 indemnity which Germany 
fancied would cripple her rival for years to 
come. Indeed, as eminent an authority as 



172 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Hans Blum insists that the indemnity so un- 
settled German finance in the years after the 
war and until 1880 as actually to have been a 
grave injury to the recipients. As for the moral 
effects, surely the injury done to Germany in 
the opinion of the rest of the world by her 
forced levies upon Belgian cities far outweighs 
the benefit of the actual sums received, which 
are at best trifling compared with what this war 
is costing her in a single week. 

Still other far-sighted Englishmen are much 
less concerned with the terms of peace than 
with doing away with the political conditions 
which make such a catastrophe possible. They 
desire no more secret British diplomacy; they 
would broaden the basis of the English diplo- 
matic service so that it shall not hereafter be 
restricted to graduates of Eton or Christ Church 
and those possessed of four hundred pounds a 
year. They would make it impossible here- 
after for a split Cabinet to plunge Great Britain 
into war without taking a vote in Parliament, 
if not one of the people. Surely, if enlightened 
sentiment like this can make itself heard in 
England even in war times, when no one is sup- 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 173 

posed to think save in accordance with the 
wishes of the Cabinet, and then only with a 
bloodthirsty Berserker desire to inflict untold 
injury upon the enemy, advances in kind from 
the United States would strike a responsive 
chord. 

By the time the war ends we shall hear little 
or nothing of the talk of destroying Germany, 
and in that country there should speedily be 
an end of the nonsense that Germany is now 
fighting for her very existence. If history has 
taught anything, it is that a people with a 
strong individuality cannot be wiped out. Po- 
land has proved that: divided into three parts 
it yet Hves in tongue, in character, in the hearts 
of its people; and may, for all one can foresee, 
be on the verge of its restoration as a poHtical 
entity. Were Germany to be divided up among 
the AUies it could as httle be conquered. That 
which is sound and good in its Kultur would 
survive, no matter how great the difliculties. 
The German spirit — that part of it which all 
the world admires— -is unconquerable; it can 
no more be destroyed than matter, which the 
scientists tell us^ is indestructible. Norman 



174 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

Angell has shown beyond dispute that in the 
modern economic organization of society no 
nation profits by conquest of territory. The 
United States has gained nothing by holding 
the Philippines, save an administrative burden 
costly in more ways than one. It has acquired 
no trade advantages which would not inure to 
it if it hauled down its flag and let the Filipinos 
govern themselves. So Germany, if she suc- 
ceeds in holding Belgium, cannot hope to make 
Germans of the Belgians. They have been for 
a century trying to compel the Polish Prussians 
to become German Prussians — without suc- 
cess. They have fought some successful wars 
during that period, but they have lost every 
battle against the Polish language. The Flem- 
ish would equally survive under German rule 
as it has outlived the vicissitudes of the cen- 
turies. How the Germans have failed to win 
the affection of the captured French provinces 
is apparent to every student of the situation. 
Why should not every effort, therefore, be 
directed toward avoiding these old pitfalls and 
making a peace which shall advance humanity 
and not retard its spiritual development? 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 175 

It is only the statesmen, the small ruling 
cliques, who, apart from the masses of the people, 
fail to appreciate this — who cKng to the old 
shibboleths and still lust for conquests. The 
masses of no people seek the lands of others. 
Surplus populations do not by any means all go 
to colonies, when colonies there are. There has 
been nothing more striking about this entire 
war than the discovery of the multitudes of 
Germans who lived in France and England, and 
of the French and English who lived in Ger- 
many. Thousands of them refused to go even 
after war was declared, notably in Germany. 
That was their home despite their technical 
British nationality, and there they wanted to 
stay in peace, and there the men are in con- 
centration camps to-day, owing to the un- 
generous policy of the English Government. 
What would happen to German and Italian 
multitudes in the United States if we should go 
to war with Germany or Italy, it is not easy to 
foresee. This is one of the effective, but quiet 
and unsuspected, ways in which economic and 
social forces are gradually breaking down in- 
ternational boundaries and hastening the day 



176 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

of a world-federation. It is one of the factors 
which make ridiculous the fire-eaters' asser- 
tion that Germany if conquered will be humbled 
in the dust. There is too little real enmity 
between the warring peoples, between the men 
in the ranks, who respect each other's prowess, 
to make this possible. All the greater should 
be the pressure from all neutral lands against 
any attempt to strike down her misled people. 

American opinion, particularly, must be di- 
rected toward safeguarding the best interests 
of Germany when the war ends, for the claims 
of her people upon us cannot be denied, how- 
ever we may reprobate her participation in the 
struggle or the policies of her General Staff. 
This will be the time to show how deep-seated 
is the friendship between the two nations, and 
to"prove that we remember how German brain 
and brawn have helped to make this country what 
it is. German axes have hewn the pioneer's 
way through many a forest. In whole sections 
they alone till the soil. Everywhere they rank 
among the most industrious and law-abiding; 
few are either agitators or enemies of the ex- 
isting order, so that there is wide-spread regret 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 177 

that no more of them are coming to us. In our 
national crises they have stood fast, taking 
military service for ideahstic reasons — thou- 
sands even who had not begun to master the 
EngHsh language. They are bone of our bone 
and sinew of our sinew. They have enriched 
our national life; what we owe to them for the 
development of art and music is incalculable. 
But if there were not a single German-born cit- 
izen among us, our debt to the intellect and the 
heart of Germany itself is such that this coun- 
try could not be ungenerous or unjust to it in 
its hour of distress, whatever its wrong-doing. 
As Carl Schurz once put it: "The friendship 
between the United States and Germany is as 
old as the republic itself. It has remained 
unbroken because it was demanded by all con- 
siderations of interest, of civilization, and of 
international good will. There is between the 
two nations not the slightest occasion for dis- 
cord." 

Nothing makes friendships whether between 
individuals or nations as does generosity. The 
United States, which set the noblest example of 
forgiveness and of leniency ever seen in deal- 



178 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

ing with its rebels of 1861-65, can prove that this 
is the poHcy which makes best for concord and 
amity. Had the scaffold taken its toll after 
Appomattox, no such speedy reunion as we have 
witnessed would have been seen. If that pol- 
icy of forgiveness was possible in the heat and 
bitterness of our civil strife, when treason was 
rife, after the murder of the nation's best-be- 
loved executive, the Englishmen who are already 
working for a future friendship between their 
country and the Kaiser's are eminently justified 
in their aim. Prussian militarism is a disease 
to be eradicated; the whole aggressive attitude 
of the ruHng Germans who to-day embody the 
nation is the inevitable result of their milita- 
rism and autocracy, combined with the bad 
manners of a nouveau riche nation which has 
grown wealthy overnight. Our own country, 
if Dickens, Trollope, Harriet Martineau, and 
other travellers are to be trusted, went through 
a period of similar rudeness coupled with a 
similar egotism, until awakened by the Civil 
War. As it outgrew this state, so must embat- 
tled Germany hers. The point is that there is 
in German Kultur, that is, in her spirit, her 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 179 

steadfastness, in the homely virtues and indus- 
try of the masses of her people, the frequent 
inspiration of her men of learning, her artists 
and musicians, in her reverence for the achieve- 
ments of the intellect, much that is priceless 
for all humanity, and this must be preserved. 
Every nation makes some such vital original 
contributions to the credit side of the world's 
vast bank-account. England makes hers, and 
so does France, and so, too, through her dem- 
ocratic institutions, the absence of caste, the 
freedom of her people to think freely, to labor, 
to rise in the social scale as they please, does our 
own United States. From that credit total the 
world is not rich enough to spare a part. 

Our country in this pregnant hour has an- 
other duty. It is to reaflBrm to itself bravely 
and proudly the fundamental things for which 
the nation stands. Theoretically, we do not 
believe in kings any more than in standing 
armies. Yet there has been noticeable a tend- 
ency among us to look upon kings and kaisers 
and courts with a different eye from that of our 
fathers. Some of us have not only taken kindly 
to aristocracies, but have been eager to crook 



180 GERMANY EMBATTLED 

the knee to royalty. It is a pleasant after-din- 
ner babble to discourse of the evils of universal 
suffrage; even to lament, if tilings go not to 
our taste, that there is not a permanent, stable 
head at Washington. How else are we to have 
the kind of efficiency that is Germany's.^ Or 
as good city government.'^ After all, there is 
Httle difference, the argument runs, whether you 
have a king or not; one's Uberties are about as 
unfettered in England or Germany as in the 
United States. So we have graduated from the 
days when our fathers had such a hatred of 
royalty as to lead hosts of them to tear their 
families up by the roots and transplant them 
across the ocean; as to make our Fourth of July 
orators return with stale, but useful, reitera- 
tion to the fact that we are all kings; that we 
owe allegiance to no man; that we change our 
rulers as suits us and beUeve in no such non- 
sense as the divine right of anybody to decide 
the fate and destiny of the masses of his coun- 
trymen. 

It is thus a wonderful opportunity to set 
forth the value of our repubhcan institutions. 
Not that we beHeve them perfect: our Presi- 



THE UNITED STATES AND PEACE 181 

dent by himself, and our Congress, can involve 
the nation in war, ruin the hopes and aspira- 
tions of a generation, and plunge it into misery 
and grief without the consent of those so in- 
jured. But we can at least point to the mil- 
lions who have flocked to us from abroad and 
their happiness under our flag, the eagerness 
with which they seek our citizenship, the pas- 
sionate loyalty that a Carl Schurz, a Jacob Riis, 
or a Mary Antin brings to our institutions, and 
claim for those institutions that, more nearly 
than any others, they satisfy the human long- 
ing for equahty of opportunity and equaHty in 
government. We have no reason to blush for 
them, but every reason to be proud. If there 
is any cause for which Americans are justified 
in proselyting, it is that of a repubHcan form of 
government. Liberty is still enhghtening the 
world; the American flag still stands for the 
greatest achievement in self-government in re- 
corded times. All the more should this repub- 
Hc add to its long list of contributions to the 
welfare and progress of all mankind the mag- 
nificent one of leading the way to universal and 
permanent peace. 






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